


Forever Drum

by swordfishtrombones



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1990s, 1994, Getting Together, Hanlon farm, M/M, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Post-IT (2017), References to underage drinking brief mention of weed, Summer, Teenage Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Teenagers, they're 17 or 18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26089405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordfishtrombones/pseuds/swordfishtrombones
Summary: He stands up on the dock, steadying himself with a hand on Richie’s shoulder and keeping his eyes on the glint that must be Richie’s glasses at the bottom of the pond. Doing this, he can't watch the earth-stilling phenomenon of Richie's shoulder blades pressing against each other. Eddie doesn’t like the idea that he’s getting weird with Richie, so he's been trying to touch him casually now and then—although maybe the fact that he’s doing it on purpose means that battle’s long lost.“If I drown I’ll haunt you till you drop,” Eddie says, and jumps into the water.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 48
Kudos: 202





	Forever Drum

There’s a hill on the way to the Hanlon farm, and if you pedal fast and keep your head upright, you’ll catch a moment coming over the top when it feels like your bike has flown straight off the earth.

It’s Eddie’s favorite moment, usually, but not today. Today is a tossup: either the one beautiful moment when Richie comes whizzing down his own driveway to meet Eddie on the road, unreal timing meaning they can share nearly the whole ride, zooming past the late-season lupins painting the side of the road in blues and purples; or the other beautiful moment, the moment Eddie has been anticipating most of all, when the two of them fly down the bumpy, maple-lined drive toward the Hanlon farm, and catch sight of Mike and Bev sprawled in the grass, waiting for them. 

Richie jumps off his bike without coming to a full stop, hurling himself forward to fling his arms around Beverly while Mike cheers from the ground. They’re back in one piece, more or less. 

It’s not a complete reunion. Ben has been gone a week on his pre-orientation camping trip, the rest of his bags already waiting in some dim Boston dorm room. Bill has been gone even longer. He’s already at school, doing a summer writing program for actual college credit, proving what Eddie had always known—that of all of their eventual escapes, Bill’s would be most pressing and inevitable. 

Bev has chopped her hair sometime in the past few months, one side hanging longer than the other. When she breaks away from Richie to beam at him, Eddie sees she’s wearing one of Ben’s old wolf shirts with the sleeves torn off, and what looks like a pair of men’s khakis hacked into shorts. She looks, in Eddie’s mom’s words, like “a child without a mother.” To Eddie, that descriptor doesn’t feel completely derogatory. Bev looks like she does what she wants. 

The four of them stand grinning at each other for a moment, excitement for the unfettered July weekend radiating between them. Then Richie tosses his arm around Bev’s shoulders, and they all head past the big old farm house, beyond the sunken chicken coop, and down to the garden to collect Stan. 

Stan has been working on the Hanlon farm since school got out. At the end of July, he’ll take a ferry out to an Audubon-owned island, where he’ll spend the rest of the summer making sure all the sweaty nine-year-old campers survive the ocean and the woods and each other. He's the only one of them making any money this summer, at least since Richie walked away from the Gifford’s counter in the middle of a shift, but they might as well all be broke for how carefully Stan guards the handful of bills Leroy Hanlon counts out each week.

“He _loves_ him,” Mike tells them as they tramp past the barn. “He thinks he’s the face of the future.”

“Is that annoying?” Bev asks.

“It _sounds_ annoying,” Richie says. “Grandpa MOFGA and little bouncing baby MOFGA.” 

Mike shakes his head. “It’s okay. It’s just…” He trails off, and smiles when the rest of them laugh. 

They all like Mr. Hanlon. When he tells you you’re doing wrong, he doesn’t make you feel bad about it. He actually comes and talks to them when they visit, too, if just for a minute. Mike always says Leroy’s tougher when the rest of them aren’t around, plenty cool and mean when he wants to be, but he also never chimes in when the rest of them are complaining about their various parental figures. Mike’s got loyalty to his home that Eddie envies, sometimes. Some of their classmates are going to UMO because it’s the closest path that still leads away, but Mike made the choice intentionally, after weeks of deliberation. 

They don’t talk about it much, but Eddie knows it bothers Mike, to think further than college, when he’ll have to make a bigger calculation. Leaving the Cape Cod house your parents bought in the ‘70s isn’t really the same as leaving the farmstead your family’s been building for generations. 

Stan is pulling weeds from rows of zucchini plants when they spot him. He straightens up at the sight of them, grinning and waving his arm. 

They wave back lazily, coming down the hill. The day is gonna be wicked hot, already getting there. Eddie wipes perspiration off his upper lip. Richie catches his eye, sticking his tongue out to pant. 

“Goddammit, Kimberly,” Richie says in his flatlander voice, which always reminds Eddie of blindingly white Sperrys and whale watch barf bags. “You said Maine was supposed to be cold.”

“That—pardon me— _effing_ travel agency,” says Bev.

“Sir? Ma’am?” Mike says. “This is private property, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“Kenneth and Kimberly are gonna lose their feet in a bear trap one of these days,” Eddie says. 

“All right, buddy, keep your cool, we understand!” Richie elbows Bev in the side, dropping the voice. “Race you to the—” He sets off running with the word _pond_ still coming out of his mouth, old dirty trick. To her credit, Bev doesn't hesitate, just barrels after Richie, cursing his back.

Behind the vegetable garden, the field slopes down toward the water, begging you to run. The pond itself is blocked from sight by the angle and the apple trees, but you can feel it in the way it dimples the earth. Richie starts off far ahead but the rest of them are gaining, Bev laughing crazily, the sound streaming behind her like she’s holding a bubble wand and leaving a streak of sudsy color. Eddie’s competitive edge bursts from him—he sets his eyes hard on Richie’s back and kicks off, the three of them running while Mike falls back, laughing, to walk with Stan. 

The feeling of his calves working is incredible, freeing. Eddie passes Bev easily, she’s wasting breath cursing at him, and pulls neck and neck with Richie. Richie’s legs are long, but he doesn’t know shit about running, and his energy goes out in every direction. Eddie knows how to do it—low to the ground, no bounce, just speed.

He beats them all to the pond, joy bursting in his chest to be the winner. Eddie throws his arms out to stop himself from stumbling over the steep edge where the grass drops off directly into the water. He spins around, shouting victory, but no one pauses to applaud—Bev and Richie come crashing right after, splashing right into the ankle-high water. Richie kicks water at Bev, who laughs and says _“Fuck,”_ and pulls her wolf shirt over her head.

So, apparently, they still do this. Even Stan, famously spleeny in cold water, yanks his shirt off without a thought once he and Mike catch up. Standing in the pond, Bev and Richie are lifting their legs high to step out of their respective baggy shorts. Eddie’s not gonna be the one to hesitate, so he turns toward the trees in a pointless show of modesty and shimmies out of his own shirt and shorts. 

The Hanlon side of the pond is clear, but craggy. There’s no beach—just that ledge of grass and rocks, and a few vines that, lacking anything to hold onto, have wrapped around each other. If you want to lie around, you have to swim out a piece and hoist yourself onto a small, ladderless raft drifting in the water.

Bev and Richie are halfway to the raft, drifting on their backs and spitting water at each other, and Stan and Mike are wading in slowly, talking in slow, happy voices about the bonfire they’re planning for later. Eddie paddles out slowly, between them, watching Richie and Beverly messing around in the water.

They all miss Bev, but when she’s home, it’s Richie who gets her attention. With Ben and Bill gone, Stan and Mike busy on the farm, and Beverly away, Eddie’s been getting used to being the one Richie chooses. He doesn’t mind that Bev and Richie have a special kind of friendship. It’s just sort of funny that they don’t feel the need to hide it. Ha-ha funny, when you think about the thing Eddie’s been noticing with Richie lately. The way Richie will say he spent all weekend driving his sisters to various rendezvous, or cleaning the garage with his dad, or “doing nothing,” when Eddie knows that’s not quite true—that most of the time, Richie spends his weekends with Eddie.

It’s not a big deal. They _do_ kind of do nothing, mostly just biking around the neighborhood in big circles, or listening to albums in Richie’s room at night. But Richie’s the one who gets all excited about making Eddie listen to certain songs. Richie’s the one who makes a big deal about it if he thinks Eddie isn’t listening. You can’t be “nothing” and also owe someone that much attention. 

He can’t really blame Richie. If Eddie tried to explain the time they’ve been spending together, he’s not sure what he’d say, either.

Eddie dunks his head under the pond and comes back up, pushing his hand over his face and hair. When he opens his eyes Richie is looking at him. Holding eye contact, Richie dips the lower half of his face into the water. Then he whips his head around and spits the water in Bev’s face.

Eddie looks down. His stomach hurts, but it often feels that way in the water. Once you swim out past the growing things, the pond gets surprisingly clear, and it looks nice, the streaks of sunlight illuminating the rocky bottom. 

He rolls onto his back and floats in the water, watching the bright blue sky until Mike and Stan splash toward him. 

You can spend all day in the pond, exhausting every muscle in your body without realizing it’s happening. Mike finds a small green apple bobbing in the water, and for a while they take turns hurling it overhand across the surface of the pond, the five of them racing to retrieve it, sabotaging each other with aquatic attacks. None of them are amazing swimmers, but they’re good at creating sound and fury, which is usually more satisfying. 

Richie taps out first, putting the Kenneth voice back on long enough to say he needs to work on his suntan. Soon Bev and he are both sprawled on the raft, while Mike and Stan and Eddie try to get tiny glittering minnows to swim between their fingers. 

Eddie is half watching the fish and half watching the raft. Richie is sitting with his feet in the water, facing away from Eddie. Richie doesn’t swim underwater with his glasses on, so his hair is still pretty much dry, but the ends are damp and flattened in little curls against the back of his neck. He’s got a golden tan line in the shape of a crew neck, and Eddie has watched that color deepen day by day, burn by burn.

He looks back at his open palms, and the tiny minnows trying to decide if he’s safe. “Can fish get sunburns?”

Stan frowns. “Scales.”

“They actually can!” Mike says excitedly. “They can die of them.”

“Shit.” Eddie turns his hand slowly, lowering it further into the water and watching the fish scatter. “Watch out, guys.” 

He drifts away from Mike and Stan, pulling himself toward the raft in a slow breaststroke. The side of the raft is dark with the drying imprints of Bev and Richie’s bodies. Eddie grabs the raft’s boat cleat and pulls himself up. 

Bev has stretched out on her back, limbs tossed out to soak up the sun, one hand drifting in the water. Richie dangles his legs off the adjoining side of the raft, squinting across the pond to the neighboring property. 

“You’re just saying that ’cause you _know_ they’re rich,” Richie says, putting his hand out to steady himself as Eddie climbs up, making the raft rock gently.

“Am not,” Beverly counters, bringing a hand up like a visor. “Hi Eddie. Who do you think lives over there? A _poor_ person?”

“Bev thinks she can see bags of money stacked all over their lawn.” 

“You are so numb. A mowed lawn that size _is_ a stack of money.” 

Eddie peers across the water, where the neighboring farm begins. It’s not a farm in the same way that the Hanlon farm is—maybe it used to be, but he’s pretty sure they only keep horses now. The difference between the two sides of the pond is stark. The neighbors have a small rocky beach, to start, with a dock that extends from a huge mowed lawn all the way into the water. You could probably do a cannonball off the end without worrying about hitting the bottom. 

“Dude,” Eddie says, “that’s a rich person place for sure.”

Richie scoffs, and Bev raises her hand for a high five. 

Stan and Mike swim over and clamber onto the raft as well, rocking it pleasantly until they're all there, sitting side by side by side.

"We should have the fire out here," Stan says, lying down on his stomach. “Water all around, we could bring some of those bug candles…”

Mike grimaces, crossing his legs. "I'm imagining what my grandpa would do if we set the orchard on fire."

“There’s nowhere to do it anyway,” Richie points out. “No beach! Unequal distribution of beach resources!”

“Suddenly the socialist,” Bev mutters, eyes closed.

“I care!”

“You care, you just don’t know the difference between a retired dentist’s house and a fucking working farm,” Eddie says. 

Richie looks at Eddie like he's betrayed him, and Eddie snorts. 

Across the pond, two men in overalls move across the great lawn.

Richie stands up, making everyone else instinctively reach out steadying hands, and puts his hands on his bony hips. “Bev, go make those guys let us use their dock.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you love me.” 

Bev squints across the pond. “Those guys are creeps. That one used to follow me around the grocery store."

“Uh? Exactly.” 

Bev stretches out her leg and gives Richie’s ankle a light kick. “Why should _I_ ask? _You_ ask.”

“You’re the one with the _wiles.”_

Across the raft, Eddie sees Mike's eyebrows pop up his forehead. 

“Shut up, Richie,” Eddie says, but not fast enough. 

Beverly sits up. "What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“I’m just saying,” Richie says, “Ben and Bill _both_ left the _state_ after you—”

“The _fuck?”_

“Richie,” Stan says.

“It’s a compliment, she has power of which we know not! Just go give ’em a little—” Richie shimmies his shoulders. “If one Beverly Marsh handjob can make Bill Denbrough—”

Bev springs up, her shoulders a hard, shaking line. Before Richie can brace for it, she launches at him and shoves him hard. Richie topples right off the dock, plunging into the water with a splash. 

“Shut the _fuck_ up!” Beverly screams down as Richie’s head pops back up again, her hands in fists at her sides. “You don’t know _shit,_ you _fucking_ asshole!”

In the pond, Richie gazes up at her in silence, treading water.

Eddie feels frozen. He wants to look sideways at Mike and Stan, but he’s scared to move.

Beverly turns to the other side of the dock and dives. Eddie watches the bubbles where she’s disappeared. By the time she surfaces again, she’s halfway to shore and not looking back. 

“Jeez, Richie,” Mike says. “That wasn’t…” 

Richie puts his palms on the surface of the dock and pulls himself up, muscles popping in his thin arms. Eddie looks away, turning to watch Beverly's back as she walks out of the pond, grabbing her shirt and marching up the hill.

“I know, all right?” Richie says. “Man, I lost my glasses. Who wants to dive for ’em?”

Stan stands up, looking at Richie coolly. “I’m gonna go check on Bev.”

“I’ll come with you,” Mike says. “My grandpa’s gonna think something’s wrong.” 

“I’ll stay,” Eddie says, unnecessarily. Mike nods in acknowledgement, and then he and Stan slide off the side of the dock and start paddling after Bev.

Richie busies himself by leaning way over the dock and squinting down at the water, play-acting like he’s gonna see something, even though Eddie knows he can’t distinguish his own pruney fingertips. Ignoring Eddie is Richie’s way of freaking out, sometimes, which is pretty annoying. Eddie sits next to Richie, deciding that if Richie doesn’t want him there, he can at least have the guts to say so. 

“Ah,” Eddie says. The sun glints off something at the bottom of the pond unnaturally, too sharp and bright for a rock or a fish. “I see ’em.” 

“Must be nice,” Richie says morosely. 

“Seeing?”

“Yeah.” Richie leans farther over the water. "Here are my knuckles, if you wanna rap ’em.”

Eddie ignores him. He stands up on the dock, steadying himself with a hand on Richie’s shoulder and keeping his eyes on the glint that must be Richie’s glasses. Doing this, he can't watch the earth-stilling phenomenon of Richie's shoulder blades pressing against each other. Eddie doesn’t like the idea that he’s getting weird with Richie, so he's been trying to touch him casually now and then—although maybe the fact that he’s doing it on purpose means that battle’s long lost. 

“If I drown I’ll haunt you till you drop,” Eddie says, and jumps into the water.

Close to the surface the water is sunshine warm, holding him gently, but further down it turns cold and still. Eddie breathes out slowly, feeling the bubbles run up his cheek, the natural buoys of his lungs emptying out. Pressure in his ears, the feeling of his head being compressed. He kicks down. 

It’s not too deep. At the silty bottom Eddie’s hand lands on a large rock. He grasps the side, feeling around. Cautiously, he cracks his eyes open. 

There are hundreds of strains of bacteria in any pond, let alone a pond anywhere near sheep and chicken. He’ll probably get a fungal infection, will probably go blind, his eyesight traded, stupidly, for Richie’s. 

He’s lucky the water’s clear, sunshine reaching almost the bottom. Eddie turns slowly until he catches the glimmer of Richie's glasses a few feet away. He wraps his fingers around them, and kicks upward, lungs starting to ache.

Eddie surfaces with a gasp. He flings one arm over the raft, dropping Richie’s glasses, and presses his forehead against the damp wood. The air is delicious. 

“Holy shit,” he hears Richie say.

Eddie rubs his eyes with the hand that’s not holding onto the raft. They're stinging, either because of the dirty water, or because of Eddie’s expectation that they should sting. 

Richie springs forward and grabs Eddie by the upper arms, fingers awkwardly digging into his armpits as he helps haul Eddie onto the raft. It’s more necessary than Eddie would like to admit. His limbs feel like rubber. He sits down heavily, leaning forward on his knees to stop himself from doing what he wants to do, which is to flop onto his back and heave. 

Richie walks forward on his knees. He hasn’t put his glasses back on, so he doesn’t stop until he’s up in Eddie’s space. When Richie huffs a disbelieving laugh, Eddie can feel it against his face. 

Without his glasses on Richie looks like another version of himself. He kind of looks younger and older at the same time, his skin smooth, and the lines of his face clear and perfect. No protection, all touchable. 

Eddie makes himself breathe slowly. Noticing Richie like this has a weird effect on him, like the air isn’t making it into his lungs, stopping too high in his chest. 

“You really went for it,” Richie says. “I kinda thought we’d be down here for an hour.”

“Thanks for your faith in me,” Eddie says. He draws back a tiny bit and tilts his head to the side, hitting it with the heel of his palm to drive the water from his ear.

“I knew you _could,”_ Richie says. His mouth is twisting around a funny smile, too pleased. “Didn’t know you _would.”_

“You’re welcome,” Eddie croaks. He gives his temple one more good smack, and feels a bubble of water burst and trickle from his ear canal. “Mr. Magoo looking asshole.”

Richie is proving the point, squinting at him. He’d looked that way the first time Eddie got a taste of him, three months ago with his glasses knocked onto the dirty carpet, while Mr. and Mrs. Tozier snored across the hall. Richie’s mouth was cinnamony from the liquor he'd been swigging out of a collectible Pinnochio glass, and Eddie was drunk enough himself to think, for a minute, that Richie would always taste that way. Warm and nostalgic. Richie's voice sounded loose and hazy that night, hazy when he cursed quietly, and said Eddie's name, and then, “Didn’t wanna go away without doing that.”

And Eddie understood. No one wanted to start college still clueless with inexperience. He and Richie must've watched a hundred movies about teenagers desperately trying to avoid that exact fate, and Richie always did kind of believe the movies. Probably all those virginal protagonists only needed a friend like Eddie—someone pathetic enough to say yes, and let's try it like this, and I won't tell anyone if you don't.

Three times since then. Eddie has the dates memorized because he wrote them on the inside of his Physics folder after they happened: 041094, 053094, 060494, 061194. He looked at those numbers a lot as graduation drew nearer, when being distracted was expected anyway. Looked and looked, until one day he got paranoid and scratched them out.

Richie is still Eddie's best friend, so Eddie is minding the gap. The thing that happens when they're drunk and sloppy doesn't exist the rest of the time. Not unless you run your fingers over the scribble in Eddie’s Physics folder and feel the imprint of the numbers from where he’d pushed the pen down too hard.

Times like this, though, it feels like Eddie’s the only one watching out for them. He puts his hand out and pushes against Richie’s forehead. “Your breath stinks,” he says.

Richie opens his mouth wide, wafts hot breath into Eddie’s face, and turns to retrieve his glasses. He crouches over them and blows his dogbreath across the lenses. 

“There a point to that?” Eddie asks, “We just have to swim back.”

“I’m not deep sea diving on my way back, we’re not all you. Or Bev. This pond and I are quits.”

“Sure,” says Eddie. He swings his legs around the other side of the dock and slips back into the water—worse to let yourself dry off and then have to get in again. He lets his face dip into the water and starts pulling toward shore, hearing and feeling the _plop_ behind him as Richie follows.

Richie’s a faster swimmer than Eddie is, annoyingly, and he catches up with no problem. When Eddie looks sideways, Richie, clearly waiting for just this, spits a long stream of pond water into his face. 

Richie cracks up.

 _“Dude,”_ Eddie hisses, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He slaps the water, sending a wave into Richie’s laughing mouth. “Not _acting_ like someone who wants to stay dry.” 

“Too late now,” Richie says, grinning, his head bobbing gently. “You look like, like—”

“Bev was right, you know that?” Eddie kicks his legs, glaring at Richie. “You’re such a dick sometimes.” 

Richie twists his mouth and spits another weak stream of water, then turns toward the shore and kicks harder. 

Eddie groans. For all that Richie’s mantra is _any attention is good attention,_ he can take things hard.

“Rich,” Eddie calls to Richie’s back. He paddles forward until his toes touch slippery rocks. Richie is clambering up on shore, pulling his clothes back on. His t-shirt soaks through instantly, a patch at the center of his chest suctioning onto his skin.

Balancing precariously on the rocks, Eddie scrambles up to the grassy ledge. He sticks out his hand, scared for a second that Richie will ignore it, but of course he doesn’t—Richie catches him around the wrist and pulls him onto the bank.

They've been down at the pond longer than Eddie realized, and the afternoon is starting to feel rich and heavy. Pretty soon Eddie’s mom will be thinking about dinner, and if Eddie misses that he’ll miss the one moment each day that they still talk to each other.

“I gotta go,” Eddie says. He keeps his eyes down as he snatches up his shirt and shorts and tugs them on, like if by avoiding looking at Richie he could stop Richie from looking at him. Getting dressed or undressed is pretty much the most unflattering thing Eddie can imagine. People must figure out how to do it without feeling stupid, or else overpopulation wouldn’t be a problem, but maybe those people have some natural instinct Eddie doesn’t. 

Stan did it with a girl he’d met volunteering for 4-H last summer, but he’d been infuriatingly unforthcoming about the whole thing, so that’s no help. Whatever revelations Bev might have she has already wasted on Richie and his big, dumb mouth, which isn’t fair because Eddie is the one who could really use them, and he thinks he’s proven lately that _he_ knows how to keep a secret. 

Eddie yanks his shirt over his head and runs his fingers through his hair, pushing water to drip down his neck. When he looks back at Richie, Richie isn’t watching him at all, still staring up the bank at nothing. Eddie feels relieved for one second, then irritated. 

He’s pretty sure Richie got hard, that last time in June, but if it was a boner it was a drunk boner. Drunk or sober, Eddie isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do with those in general, let alone with Richie’s in particular. When he imagines going further the idea is always weird, abstract. A few nights ago Eddie had gotten off by imagining what it might feel like if Richie climbed on top of him, put his hands on Eddie’s chest, and pushed. He flushes, remembering, and fakes a cough to cover it up. Either he doesn’t know what sex is or he’s some unique kind of pervert. He already wants to apologize to the person who will someday have to find out. 

Richie is still gazing up the hill, unfocused behind his streaked glasses. He takes them off and wipes them across the dryish hem of his t-shirt. When he puts them back on, they look even dirtier. “Think I’m in the doghouse all day?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” says Eddie. “Figure it out, genius.”

“No help,” Richie says over his shoulder, and starts leading them up the hill. “Why’d I marry a doctor if he wasn’t gonna help me?”

They haven’t made that joke in a while, and it makes Eddie queasy to hear it now, used as deflection. His legs feel jellyish from swimming as he follows Richie up the hill, crushing tall grass into the damp dirt. “The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t cover reputations,” he says. 

“Sorry doctah!” Richie says in a breathy, high-pitched approximation of Ellen Greene. “Sorry I don’t spend weekends studying the Hippocratic Oath, doctah!”

Richie walks him back through the orchard, past the neat rows of squash and tomato plants, in front of the peeling red barn where the sheep must be taking shelter from the afternoon sun. Eddie and Richie clamber over the faded wooden beam fence, and it wobbles with them, making Eddie nervous until they hop down.

“How come the sheep don’t knock this over?” Eddie says. “They could.”

“Kota’d wring their necks,” Richie suggests, meaning Mike’s shaggy old Great Pyrenees, who is probably currently dozing through the heat down by the chicken coop. 

“Kota thinks he’s their mom,” Eddie says. 

“Maybe they don’t wanna leave their mom,” Richie says, and sniggers, marching them across the pasture toward the head of the drive. “Either too scared to leave or too stupid. Who cares?”

Eddie doesn’t say anything to that, uncomfortable. Richie will be heading to New York in a few months—but instead of joining Bill upstate, he’ll be right in the city. It’s been his favorite joke lately, how nervous and short-sighted the college-bound seniors of Derry, Maine have turned out to be, marching like ducklings in two shaky lines: one toward UMO, and a thinner one in the general direction of Boston. Mike and Stan are joining that first line. Eddie, Ben, and Bev are in the second. 

They round the corner of the barn, bringing the drive into view, and Eddie freezes. Between them and the drive, three fat gray geese are preening in the sun.

“Let’s,” says Eddie, nodding toward the far end of the pasture. “Let’s, uh—”

“Dude,” says Richie, and starts laughing. “You’re _not_ still scared of those.”

“Richie, _don’t,”_ Eddie says, but it’s too late. Richie is already approaching the geese, crouched down and going _pstpstpst_ the way you’d call a cat. 

_“Richie.”_ Eddie is in agony, bouncing back and forth on his feet. Richie’s got him transfixed again, another car crash in slow motion. 

“Hey big guy,” Richie says to the biggest goose. It’s taken notice of him now, staring at him, its round body going stiff. “That’s right,” Richie says, sticking his hand out further. “We’re all just animals, right, buddy? Hakuna Matata, man.”

The goose lunges forward, beak open, and chomps down on Richie's hand.

“Jesus!” Richie yelps. “Fuck!”

“Richie!”Eddie shouts again. 

The goose rears back its head, then snaps its neck forward and lunges at Richie.

“Shit!” 

Richie starts dancing back, doing the grapevine, but the goose is on the attack, neck long and wings outstretched. It runs at him, and Richie runs backward, laughing high and off-pitch.

Without thinking, Eddie darts forward. He throws his arms out wide and rushes at the goose, opens his mouth, and lets out an unholy shriek.

_“BAAAA!”_

The goose honks at him angrily, rearing back with wings flapping. Eddie doesn’t back off, waving his arms frantically, and after a moment, the goose settles down. It gives him one more aggravated honk, then turns back to its companions and waddles off in the opposite direction.

Eddie walks backward, slowly, not taking his eyes off the goose.

“Get over the fucking fence,” he says out of the side of his mouth. He can hear Richie scramble behind him, and then turns, and follows. 

They jog away from the pasture, across the patch of grass that leads to the house, and up to the start of the drive. Once they’re there, Richie bursts out laughing.

“Oh my god,” he says, leaning against Eddie, and laughs some more. “You’re right, okay, evil, devil birds, beelzebirds."

Eddie shoves him. “You never— _never_ listento me. I’m not a sheep, I’m not _stupid_ and _scared,_ sometimes I have a fucking point, okay?”

Richie looks at him, laughter fading until there’s nothing but a stiff smile. “Sorry, doctah,” he says. 

Eddie’s own irritation fizzles down. It was only a handful of hours ago that they had biked to the farm together, but it feels like he’s been living through this day for about four months. 

“What are you gonna say to Bev?” he asks. 

“She can’t still be pissed,” Richie says with enough bravado to almost cover the fact that he’s asking a question.

Eddie looks at Richie and blows out his cheeks. 

“Well, what am I _supposed_ to say?”

“I don’t know. You did it. Undo it. Do the opposite.”

“What’s the opposite of saying shit? Shutting up?”

“I wish you could hear how inconceivable you make that sound. Like, dude, maybe.”

“Sorry I don’t know how to _unsay_ stuff,” Richie says. “I don’t think _not_ _talking_ is gonna magically fix things.”

Eddie walks over to their bikes, still collapsed side by side under a maple tree. He grabs his dirty green road bike by the handles and hauls it upright. 

“How’s the old bird?” Richie asks.

“Fine. Same.” 

“She talking to you again yet?”

Eddie shrugs, which he knows Richie will understand as no. Ever since he’d gotten his fat letter from one of Boston’s many medium-impressive institutions, his mom has done a hard swerve into silence, sometimes peppered with long, tearful gazes out the window. 

“If she makes dinner,” he says, “I’ll eat it and say thanks, and then sometimes she’ll say something like—”

“Can I guess?”

“Sure.”

_“Eddie-bear, it’s not honest to thank me for being a good mother if you don’t think I am.”_

Eddie laughs, surprised. 

“Did I get it?” Richie asks, grinning.

“You’re definitely on theme.”

“That fucking blows.” Richie moves in closer, looping his hand around the front bar of Eddie’s bike frame. He picks at the long-peeling manufacturer’s sticker. 

His shirt is mostly dry now, hanging off his skinny shoulders. Richie doesn't look much like the statues Bev used to dutifully sketch out of textbooks for Advanced Studio Art, but Eddie kind of gets it, looking at him, the appeal of sculpting flesh and fabric over and over again. 

“You could still stay here,” Richie says. “Mr. H. makes Bev sleep way off on the other end of the house, but you could shack up with the rest of us in the blue room. And Mr. H. sleeps like a corpse, we could have a rave and he wouldn’t know it.” Richie slides his hand up the bike frame and wraps his fingers around Eddie’s wrist, pulling his arm up and moving it side to side, like Eddie’s dancing. _“Woohoo!”_

“Much as I love getting Mike’s feet in my face and Stan snoring in my ear,” Eddie says. The warm grip of Richie’s hand on his wrist is making him nervous. He pulls his arm down and gets on his bike clumsily, and Richie lets his hand drop back to his side. 

Eddie takes a look at Richie, trying to find a good way to frame the question he wants to ask. After a moment, he settles on, “You good, Rich?” 

And just like that, Richie’s big smile is plastered back on his face. “Send mommy my love,” he says, and steps back. 

Eddie kicks off, and turns up toward the tall maples, and bikes the bumpy road home alone. 

Riding toward town is a lot harder, going uphill most of the way instead of down. Eddie furiously pumps up about a quarter of the hill—and then, because no one is there to see, gets off his bike and walks it the rest of the way. 

The top of the hill offers one of Derry’s nicer views. In the summertime, the field by the side of the unmarked road stretches out green, looking flat and empty if you don’t know to search for tiny tart blueberries under the low brush. Berries are good, but Eddie likes the field best in the fall, when it turns blazing scarlet. For a few weeks, Derry looks bright and loud, like a place where bright and loud people might come from. 

Odds are, Eddie realizes, he’s not gonna see the blueberry fields turn red again. The last time he’ll ever see it might have already happened, and he hadn’t even realized. This makes him think about Richie, and how badly Richie would tear into him for thinking something so corny about _Derry,_ and for some reason that pisses Eddie off. He stops in front of a rock the size of his fist, draws his leg back, and kicks it hard over the blueberry field, letting out a sound that isn’t loud enough to be a scream, but close. Then he gets back on his bike, toes throbbing, and starts pedaling again.

Every time it’s happened, as far Eddie can remember through the fog you get after mixing vodka with Hi-C, it’s started the same way—with Eddie reaching out, Gumby-armed, and grabbing Richie’s face. This year he’s discovered he’s a greedy drunk, trying to grab Richie’s drink out of his hand, trying to steal everything that Richie has and that Eddie wants. Richie doesn’t hesitate or pull away. He goes down easy.

Who knows if Richie will remember those out-of-it-nights, once he’s in New York and making out with people on purpose. Or if he’ll carefully bury those memories somewhere he’ll never find them, letting his brain level every hometown snag until the past turns smooth as seaglass. 

It makes Eddie kind of sick to think about. He has an idea how this might go. A few more drunk makeouts over the summer, getting grosser and grosser each time, and then he’ll head to Boston and Richie will go to New York, the farthest place any of them can imagine, and they’ll conveniently never have to think about it again. A pop and a fizzle, like a can of soda going flat.

+

In the morning, Eddie gets out the door without seeing his mom, and heads back to the farm. 

He’d gotten home too late the night before—his mom had already eaten and was resolutely tutting over an episode of _In the Heat of the Night_ by the time Eddie crept inside _._ He had fed himself some Velveeta on toast and two Dunkaroos, and gone upstairs as quietly as he could.

It doesn’t matter. This was the plan, anyway, to get away early and spend the day with his friends, in an attempt to compensate for the fact that Eddie’s the only one who won’t be joining them tonight. Richie and Bev and Mike and Stan are gonna camp out in the field by the old one-room schoolhouse this evening, roasting hot dogs over one of Stan’s meticulous campfires and counting made-up constellations. Meanwhile, Eddie will be home, eating turkey casserole without complaint and brushing his teeth for exactly three minutes and drawing the curtains at 7pm, doing all the little rituals that he’s allowing himself to superstitiously believe will mean his mom will forgive him enough to say goodbye at the end of August. 

There’s a Renys on the way out of town, so Eddie rides up to the bike rack and goes inside, combing the snack aisle for non-verbal apologies. In a few minutes he’s back out with a plastic bag full of Humpty Dumpty potato chips and extra marshmallows and a can of swamp green Surge for Richie. Eddie hooks the bag on his handlebars, and the Surge bangs bruisingly against his thighs all the way to the farm.

It’s a glorious day, hot and a little breezy, the whole point of July. Stan only has to work until the sun rises high and unbearable, and they’re all there to make the job go faster. Eddie lets his bike fall in the dooryard, and then goes to join his friends in the garden. 

Everyone is crouched among the tomato plants, pulling shiny yellow beetles off the leaves. Eddie presses the sweating can of Surge into Richie’s hand as he walks past, avoiding holding his gaze when Richie squints up at him and grins. 

He crouches in one row next to Bev, who has given up on staying clean and is sitting cross-legged in the dirt. Across from them, Richie has also got his ass in the dirt. He's letting a grub wriggle across his forefinger, chatting with Mike, and sparing an occasional withering look at Stan. 

Every so often, Leroy Hanlon walks down the row of tomatoes and peers into Stan’s white grub bucket. Usually Stan gets an approving grunt or a pat on the shoulder, which makes him look embarrassingly pleased, and sets Richie off making fun.

“How come Stan’s the only one who gets paid for this?” Richie grumbles as he plucks one beetle off a shiny leaf and flicks it into the grass. “We're here too.” 

“Because Stan actually works,” Mr. Hanlon says, giving Richie a dull thump on the back. “And he doesn’t throw the grubs off where they’re likely to come crawling back first thing.” 

A row over, Bev laughs coldly, even though she and Eddie have been doing the same thing. Only Mike and Stan do it right, dropping fat beetles into Stan’s bucket and barely even pulling faces. The pride on Stan’s face is pretty funny, considering the way he gets with bugs when he thinks no one’s looking. 

Across the row of tomato plants, Mike wrinkles his nose and holds up his hand, his fingers smeared with damp earth and sticky bug juice. “Gross.”

Leroy wipes his own brow with a filthy white handkerchief and tosses it over his shoulder. “Rinse off before coming in,” he tells them gruffly, and turns back toward the house. 

Richie waits until he’s reached the front door, and says, “That means we’re done, right?”

Stan throws a potato bug at him. 

“Everyone’s being mean to me,” Richie says pitifully. Bev shoots him an icy look. Eddie tugs on a glossy leaf, silently asks himself if he has any shame, then decides that he doesn’t. He stands up, smacking dirt from his shorts, and steps over the row of tomato plants to join Richie. 

“Traitor,” Bev mutters.

Tomato plants smell like nothing else, bright and sweet even before the fruit appears. The bugs have their own weird smell too, sort of like oil, or decaying wood, and even though the scent is everywhere it hits Eddie again as he sits down on his heels next to Richie. 

Richie grins at him. Eddie’s stomach flips, and then he thinks, _pathetic._ He takes stock of Richie quickly: grime worked into his nail beds, hair damp around his temples, and a streak of dirt on his neck that’s been smudged through with a rivulet of sweat. Feeling hot in his face and chest, Eddie looks down. 

A beetle is marching precariously across the edge of a leaf in front of him. Eddie pulls the leaf back, and catapults the bug into outer space.

“Are we monsters to them?” Eddie asks. “Are they, like, shitting themselves?”

 _“Can_ they shit themselves,” Richie asks. “A two part question: part one, do bugs shit, and part two, if they don’t wear pants, can they be said to be shitting _themselves.”_

“Okay,” says Eddie, “if that’s how you wanna do it, how come _babies_ get to shit themselves, they’re usually not wearing pants either.”

“They’re wearing diapers, Eds, that counts, plus how often do you hear Mrs. Hitchner get up from a bean supper at the Grange or whatever, like, _oh, do pardon me, my little Jeanie just shit herself_? I know it’s confusing for you since you’ve been hearing your mom say that about you once a day since September third, 1976—”

“Hey,” says Stan, straightening up. “I have a great idea, why don’t you guys go find kindling for later. Walk around the farm. Take the long way.”

 _“Thank_ you,” says Bev.

“You telling us to fuck off?” Eddie starts to ask, but Richie is leaping to his feet with his soda in hand.

“Gift horses, Eds!”

“There’s plenty of dry-ki around the stone wall,” Mike supplies helpfully. Eddie flips him off. 

“And if you really wanna flirt that bad we can all play Post Office later,” Stan adds tersely, leaning back over the tomatoes. 

“You wish, Staniel,” Richie says, quick enough that maybe no one notices Eddie go red as one of the tomatoes.

They do go down toward the edge of the Hanlon property, although Richie swears up and down the whole way that he won’t pick up one twig, and Eddie doesn’t see why he should either, if he’s not even gonna be there. Technically speaking, the Hanlon farm peters off in the wood somewhere, but the boundaries feel arbitrary—it’s all unusable past a certain point, unless you’re just looking for a place to be alone, or to drink your way through a six-pack without judgement. Which, judging by the litter, plenty of people have done. 

They’d spent a lot of time in these scraggly woods from about age thirteen to fifteen. Eddie and Mike shared their first beer (courtesy of a napping Leroy Hanlon) on a fallen tree trunk around here somewhere, and had sheepishly admitted to each other that neither of them much liked the soapy taste. Richie doesn’t know that story, and Eddie isn’t really inclined to tell it to him now. He’s always assumed he’d have unlimited time to tell Richie every story he’d ever missed out on, although it’s probably time to stop taking that for granted. 

“So,” says Eddie, pushing a lopsided branch out of the way and stepping into the mess of trees. Shaggy white spruce, red oak with its old elephant bark, the occasional birch. Above them, big flat leaves and heavy arms of pine make an irregular canopy in a hundred shades of green. “Looks like Beverly is, in fact, still pissed.”

“Yeah, I actually did put that together,” Richie says. He smacks a spruce branch to the side with too much spite. It comes back and slaps him across the face. _“Fuck.”_

“Great job.”

“Thanks so much. This is why I wear my protective lenses.”

The floor of the wood is carpeted with brown pine needles and half-decayed leaves. Eddie steps onto a boulder, tall enough to give him a few inches on Richie. 

“Ha ha ha,” he says in a booming giant’s voice, putting his fists on his hips. 

Richie, seeing an opportunity, moves to poke him in the stomach. Instinctively, Eddie jerks back, stumbling off the boulder. 

He must have looked a little too panicked, because for a second Richie freezes, then slowly draws his hand back to his side. 

Eddie pats his stomach vaguely. “My weak spot,” he says. 

“Right,” Richie says, sounding tense. “Smaug.” 

“Uh,” says Eddie. “Remember that time Bev tried to fuck up my turn at Zelda by going at my stomach.” The word “tickling” is too humiliating to say out loud. 

Richie snickers. “I remember the black eye she got when you kicked her in the face.”

“And she looked good with it.”

“Anything you need to tell yourself.”

“She looked a lot better than _I_ did with one.”

 _“That_ is true.” Richie laughs, and his voice is back to normal again. “Hey Eddie, how’d you get that again?”

“You were there, dude.”

“Come on, say it for me.”

“I tripped and fell on a box.”

“You tripped on a half-deflated bright purple inflatable armchair,” Richie says, with relish, “and slammed face-first into a box of VHSs. I think it was the corner of _Steel Magnolias_ that almost took your eye out. Details are the spice of life, Eds.”

“Spice of fucking life. I’ve seen your nose run from eating a taco dinner box.”

“You’re all the spice one man can take.” Richie tips his head back and drains the last drops of his soda. “How was your night home with mommy?”

“Oh, fantastic.” Eddie steps over a decaying stump, leading them further into the woods, toward the mossy remnants of the old stone wall. The trees aren’t dense around here, and you can walk a ways in without losing any light. “Finally took pictures for our Christmas in July card, ate a whole meatloaf, and spent most of the evening working on our song and dance number.”

“Word. I can just see you in matching outfits dancing with canes.” Richie grabs a stick off the ground and gives it a twirl. _“Yessiree, feelin’ grand, we're an act that's in demand!_ Or are you hitting it on the nose and doing Gypsy?”

“Mean Green Mother From Outer Space,” Eddie corrects, because he knows Richie will love that. He brushes another branch out of the way, handing it off to Richie so this one doesn’t get him in the face. “You ever notice Mike doesn’t talk about Mr. Hanlon like this?”

“Okay,” says Richie. “How much do Mr. Hanlon and your mom have in common, you think?”

They’ve reached the stone wall, crumbling down into nothing in the dirt. The parts that are still intact come up to about Eddie’s knee. He puts his foot up on a stone, making it wobble back and forth. “Not much,” he concedes. “How come Mr. Hanlon didn’t try to make us eat fiddleheads this year?”

“He probably took your four straight years of refusal as a sign we didn’t like ’em.”

“Yeah, but, still.” Eddie takes his foot down, and reaches up quickly to make sure he doesn’t take the stone with him. You’d think surviving hundreds of years would mean something’s pretty strong, but that could just mean no one’s bothered to test its strength. “Not eating them is, like, tradition.”

Down the wall there’s an old dumping ground—about a yard of scattered beer cans and rusty bed springs poking out through the leaves and dirt. Richie walks over to it and gives a broken green bottle a small kick. 

“Think I should leave this here?” he asks, holding up his Surge can. “Add my piece to Derry history before I jet?”

“Genius idea,” Eddie says, “’cause then Stanley will actually chase you out of town with a machete and that’s one less person to miss.”

“Maybe that’s what your mom is doing,” Richie says, perching the soda can on the wall. It look stupid there, out of place. “Reminding you that you don’t have to worry about leaving because there’s nothing to miss. Nice of her.”

The thought has actually occurred to Eddie. He can imagine his mom after he leaves, not hysteric and tearful, but instead coldly reviewing Eddie’s trespasses. Maybe it would even be better that way, except it doesn’t feel like what’s going on. She’s done this before, reeled him in with distance when closeness failed. After he’d slammed a door in second grade, she’d told him she couldn’t talk to him if he was being wild. That time, the silence probably only lasted a matter of hours, but it still ended with Eddie in humiliating tears, feeling like he’d been thrust into one of his nightmares where no one could see or hear him. He’d cried himself out on his mom’s lap, and she’d stroked his hair and rocked him, and said, _See, isn’t it so much better when we use our words._

Eddie leans back against the wall, trying to focus on the scratch of stone against his calves. “That’s not it,” he says.

Richie looks at him. “It’s fucked up,” he says.

“I know, Richie. You hate her.”

“No, dude, for real. I’m telling you now, before you go off and start telling your dormmates that your mom sucks, and they’re like, _yeah bro, mine too, she threw out my Game Boy ’cause she smelled skunk while washing my tighty-whities._ It’s not fucked in the normal way. It’s like, fucked-fucked.”

“You’d know,” Eddie mutters. He picks up the empty soda can and starts crushing it between his hands, not wanting to look at Richie. He has cautiously thought the thing Richie is saying frequently enough that it’s not so shocking to hear out loud. And there’s something distressing about Richie’s voice when he’s actually trying to be heard.

“I’m just saying.” Richie goes next to Eddie, putting his palms down on one of the stones. This close, Eddie can see the gap that’s reappearing between Richie’s front teeth after two years of spitting out his retainer. “Since you’re breaking our oath. I gotta give you my notes now.”

“I’m not breaking shit.” The tin of the soda can tears in Eddie’s hands, contradicting him. “We were like twelve. And we didn’t even agree on a city.”

“Oh, yeah, what city could we possibly have been talking about.” 

“There are a lot of cities in the world, dude.”

“Kinda doesn’t feel that way, though, does it.” Richie flips a rusted-through tin can with the toe of his sneakers, watching the grubs writhe underneath. “Wish Bev would give it up,” he says. “If she pulls a Bill this fall I’m stealing a car and driving to Northampton.”

Bill hasn’t called once since heading to New York. Neither has Ben, but since he’s camping that’s forgiven. The last time any of them saw Bill was the night before he left, the very first of them to depart Derry. Mr. and Mrs. Denbrough went to bed early and left them the whole downstairs, which felt more or less like tacit permission to get quietly drunk. It was a weird, not entirely good night. Eddie spent a lot of it instructing himself over and over again not to sit too close to Richie, knowing what would happen if they were left alone. Past midnight, when Bill himself was out cold on the couch, Stan got up to get some water and returned moments later looking bewildered. He sat back down on the carpet and whispered to Eddie not to go to the bathroom because Mike was in there, crying.

Richie might be thinking the same thing, because he sighs and says, “God, this should be the best summer ever but it’s gonna get so depressing. Everyone taking turns saying goodbye like it’s the end of _The_ _Wizard of Oz.”_

“Think I’ll miss you most of all, fucknuts,” Eddie says. 

Richie laughs, and then lets it die. “I actually will,” he says. “For the record.”

Eddie isn’t sure what to say to that. He rubs the side of his neck, and then remembers the feeling of Richie biting into that same spot, and puts his hand down quickly. 

“Not that I expect...” Richie starts to say, and trails off. “Just, _you_ don’t pull a Bill either.”

“I haven’t been planning on it,” Eddie says slowly. “Notice you’ve never threatened to steal a car for me, though.”

Richie gives him a funny look. “Yeah,” he says. “Guess I figured I didn’t need to. You know, uh. Greyhound between New York and Boston is only like four hours. My fall break starts two days before yours, but I’ll sleep on the floor if your roommate’s not a freak.” 

Eddie leans back against the stone wall too hard and sends one of the stones toppling. 

He didn’t know Richie knew his break. It’s a funny thing to imagine, Richie cross-legged in his bedroom, reading through the Northeastern brochure like he was going there himself.

“You wanna do that?” he asks.

Richie turns to face Eddie. “If I show up,” he says, “then obviously I do. I wouldn’t do it if I didn't mean it. You know what I mean?" 

“I don’t know. You kind of fuck around a lot.”

“And I’m learning a very important lesson about that,” Richie says piously. “I’m forever changed.” He pauses to give Eddie time to retch. “Would you want me to come?”

So they’re here, then. Awkward enough that Richie has to ask if Eddie even wants to see him. It hurts, but not worse than it hurts to imagine Richie rushing so far out ahead of Eddie that he fades from view entirely.

“Maybe,” Eddie says. “If my roommate's not a freak.”

Richie’s eyes flit across Eddie’s face. “I wish you could stay over. I was thinking about you and that goose.” He flaps his arms like Eddie had done yesterday, grinning at him. _“_ Big fan ofyour berserker mode.”

“I’ll let it rip your fucking hand off next time.”

“I don’t believe that.” Richie takes his glasses off and rubs them over his shirt, and Eddie gets it again, that weird preview of what he’s gonna look like when he’s older and doing whatever he wants. “You got my glasses, too.”

Eddie folds his arms over his stomach, watching Richie’s hands apprehensively. The fact that Richie feels the need to point this out is not good news. One step closer to the moment he realizes Eddie isn’t the person he’s been playing at being to make this work. Eddie's not just fucked, but fucked-fucked. 

Richie puts his glasses back on his face. “We can talk about it,” he says. “If you want to.”

Eddie blinks. Fall break. “Do we have to figure it out now?” he asks. 

Richie looks down at his foot and grins at it, almost looking flushed. He must be so relieved, Eddie thinks, and aches with the thought of it.

“No.” Richie says. “Whenever. I’m around.”

“For now.”

“For now!” Richie agrees happily, and shoulders Eddie, and bursts out, _“Show me how and I will, I’ll get out of here, I’ll start climbing uphill and get out of here, someone tell me I still could get out of here—_ your line is coming up, Eds, don’t fuck up on me—” And on and on, all the way back up the hill. 

\+ 

They find the others in the yard outside the Hanlon house, playing in the sprinkler like kids, potato bugs forgotten. The yard isn’t neatly mowed like the one across the pond, but it’s got the long green hose, and two dingy plastic beach chairs overlooking the orchard, and sometimes Kota, when he is, in Mr. Hanlon’s words, _trying to be cunnin’._

Stan is lying in the grass directly under the sprinkler, eyes closed and clothes and hair completely drenched, while Mike and Bev, laughing and shouting, take turns jumping over him.

“I can’t believe we dipped because they weren’t having enough fun,” Richie says as Bev leaps over Stan’s prone body, giggling hysterically.

“That’s a record for the long jump!” Mike shouts. Bev looks around victoriously, grin landing on Richie. 

There we go, thinks Eddie. But then Bev’s grin falters, and she looks away.

Richie has got to notice, but he still claps and hoots for Bev’s jump. “Ow _ow!”_ he shouts, coming into the yard. “Miss Marsh keeps her indomitable grip on the title!”

“Does a challenger approach?” Mike asks.

Instantly, Stan sits up and crab walks out from under the sprinkler, blinking water out of his eyes. “No,” he gasps, “that’s it for me.”

“You don’t trust me?” Richie asks, hand to heart.

“I don’t trust either of you,” Stan says from the ground, waving his hand at Richie and Eddie, “and I value my life.”

Bev goes over to where the sprinkler is screwed onto the end of a long green hose, sits on the wet ground, and unscrews it, sending a spray of water into her face.

“Aw, Eddie killed the buzz,” Richie says. “You little buzzkill, buzz buzz buzz.”

“I’m a buzzkill in that if you don’t quit buzzing I’m gonna kill you.”

Bev shakes her head from the ground. “I’m gonna go change, I just want to rinse my feet off first so Mr. Hanlon doesn’t hate me.”

They all know Bev is Mr. Hanlon’s favorite right after Stanley, but she’s still careful to wash the mud off her feet before slipping them into her sandals. 

Stan and Mike go to shake the water out of their hair on the beach chairs. Richie leaves Eddie’s side and sidles up to Bev. 

Eddie is clearly not a part of this moment, so he wanders over to Mike and Stan, who have kicked back on the chairs and have started pull-hauling lazily about the only comic book Mike reads.

“I just don’t get why she’s a _goth girl,”_ Stan is saying, eyes closed to the sun. “Why does she even have to look human.”

Eddie sits down on the grass in front of them, crossing his legs. 

“We’re humans, Stan,” Mike says. Stan scoffs.

The way Eddie’s positioned means he can still see Bev sitting on the back door step, looking up at Richie with her brow furrowed. Richie’s talking with his hands, his shoulders drawn high. A snippet of his voice floats back, and Eddie catches, _“...if it makes you feel better.”_

“I can’t argue with you when I know you’ve read about two pages,” Mike says. “But when you _do_ read it, maybe also read anything about Greek gods, myths are reflections, man…”

_“I don’t wanna do that,”_ Eddie can hear Beverly say. _“I just want you to not be a dick.”_

Mike obviously caught that too, because the side of his mouth quirks up. 

“I’m not saying it’s new,” Stan says, “I’m just saying it sucks.”

“Speaking of things that aren’t new and suck,” Eddie says, deciding he’s had enough of whatever Richie and Bev are doing. “This conversation gonna wrap soon?”

Mike pokes at his shoulder with his foot. “Have fun in the woods?”

“Don’t answer that, I don’t wanna know,” Stan says. 

“Screw you both.” Eddie pushes Mike’s foot off of him. The earth under Eddie’s ass is damp, and he’s probably truly ruined his clothes today, but at least he knows his mom won’t say anything. 

Behind Mike, Eddie can see Richie following Bev into the farmhouse. Back in middle school Bev and Richie used to trail each other down the hall all the time, laughing and talking, until the sight of Richie waiting under the sign for the girls' bathroom started to attract a bad kind of attention.

An orange monarch flutters down and lands, briefly, on Mike’s knee. Stan stays stock still until it flies away, and then he sits up excitedly, him and Mike locking eyes and grinning wordlessly at each other.

Eddie loves Mike and Stanley, but they’ve been spending a lot of time together lately—preparing, he guesses, to be the two losers left in Maine. Things are tilting, coming unbalanced. They all reconfigured after Bev left for Portland, and again when the Denbroughs moved to Bangor, and again after Ben. It’s just gonna keep happening, probably, everyone scrambling into new constellations until they’re all separated for good.

Eddie feels irritable again, noticing it. “When’d you guys get so fucking corny,” he says. 

“You’re hanging out with Richie too much,” Mike says. “Corny police.”

“If that was a real job I wouldn’t be going to college,” Eddie says, and gets up. 

He can go inside to get a glass of water. Nothing weird about that. It’d be weirder if he didn’t, actually, considering he’s still got to ride up the hill to get home, and if he doesn’t drink something he’ll basically be begging for heatstroke. Eddie drags his sneakers against the back stoop to scrape off the mud, and pushes open the red door, stepping into the wide kitchen.

Inside, pots and dried plants hang from the ceiling. The old oak table is covered with newspapers, glued down by months of coffee rings. Light pours in under the faded white curtains and each sunray illuminates a beam of airborne dust. 

Eddie’s mom would hate it in here, but she’s never been, and probably never will be. If it wasn’t for Leroy Hanlon’s annual appearance at the Congregational church’s Christmas Eve service, chances are none of the neighbors would know he’d made it through another winter. Adults, in Eddie’s experience, don’t waste much time on social calls. 

Eddie pulls a crystal whiskey glass from the shelf over the stove and shuts the cupboard door too hard. He fills it at the tap, and drinks the water in front of the refrigerator. 

The Hanlon fridge is covered in lists and photos. In the center, there’s a square of paper with all their phone numbers written in Mike’s tidy elementary school script, protected over the years by a solid coating of scotch tape. Beneath it, there’s a photograph from just five months ago—Mike, Richie, and Eddie posing idiotically behind the high school on prom night, wearing three of Wentworth Tozier’s XXL navy suits. Dateless and trying to be superior about it, Richie had gotten them to sneak into the back of the gussied up school gymnasium, where they enjoyed twenty-five minutes of inventing mildly obscene variations of Cotton-Eyed Joe before Eddie’s track coach came over to check if they had tickets. 

Eddie has seen the photo before, but it’s still surreal. Nothing like it had materialized on Richie’s fridge, and certainly not on Eddie’s. The disposable camera had turned all of their eyes bright red, ironically disguising the fact that Richie was pinching a roach behind his back and would later need Eddie to take off his shoes. It would still be another two weeks before Eddie would get slushy enough to do the thing he’d wanted to do then, and put his mouth on the soft triangle of flesh above Richie's collarbone.

He finishes his glass of water, refills it, and wanders into the dark living room. 

The Hanlon farmhouse is _old,_ in a way that feels totally different from any other old house Eddie’s been inside. There are paintings on the walls that Eddie knows for a fact are older than Leroy Hanlon, and the furniture probably hasn't been rearranged since the barn raising. 

Eddie bumps into a caved-in ottoman, swears, and leans down to rub his shin. When he looks up, he’s staring right through a cracked door into the downstairs bedroom. 

The door is open just enough to show the huge old bed. Bev and Richie are in there, on the bed, holding hands and talking intensely. Richie’s feet are tucked under the patchwork quilt.

Eddie takes a step backwards and the floorboard creaks. If they hadn’t heard him banging into the ottoman they’d obviously heard that. Embarrassed, he turns and hurries through the kitchen, into the mudroom, and out the front door where no one’s waiting.

Bev and Richie have always been close. That shouldn’t make him feel anything in particular. It’s just the way they have with each other, comfortable and private. Eddie knows Bev likes Liz Phair and L7, and Richie likes Butthole Surfers, possibly just for the name, and NOFX, and the new Green Day album, although he always gets weird about it and skips songs. But also, at Lea Ruiz’s Homecoming party this year, a song Eddie didn’t know came on the stereo, and when Richie heard the opening notes he spun around and grinned at Bev. The two of them belted the whole thing to each other, wailing _aye-yi-yi, aye-yi-yi, I want you_ while Eddie bobbed in the background, thinking something unspeakable about how Richie was actually a pretty good singer when he wasn’t doing Ellen Greene, and maybe his plans really would work out after all.

Richie and Eddie are also supposed to have that. It’s changed this year. They used to go up and down together easy as the tide. 

“What the fuck,” Eddie mutters to himself, trailing off at the part his brain is so good at filling in. _Is wrong with you. Wrong with you, you, you._

There’s a rock under the closest maple, and Eddie sits on it. It’s shady under the tree, but the air is still heavy with humidity. Shade in the summertime, syrup in the spring. Earlier this year Leroy let them collect the sap unsupervised for the first time, with strict instructions about who was allowed to drive the pickup. So Stan and Mike piled into the front, while Eddie and Richie bumped around in the cargo bed with the buckets and hoses, grabbing each other’s elbows for stability and daring one another to stand up while Mike drove over a pothole. 

Derry blows hot cheese, and a year ago Eddie would’ve bet money none of them would spare it a glance in the rearview mirror. But now, a childish part of him thinks he could kill Richie for acting like there’s nothing to miss.

Eddie’s still clutching the whiskey tumbler, he realizes. He drains it, and then balances it on his knees, looking at the house through the crystal and feeling stupid. 

It’s through the glass that he sees the front door slam open and Richie stick his head out. Richie catches sight of Eddie and comes striding into the dooryard, letting the storm door bang shut behind him. 

“Hey!” Richie says, stopping in front of Eddie’s rock. “Were you looking for me?”

Eddie curls his hands around the whiskey glass on his knees. “Just getting water.”

“Oh.” Richie smiles lopsidedly at him. “I thought maybe you wanted to talk. Like we were saying earlier.”

Eddie is not in the mood. He nods toward the house. “Fixed things?”

“Yeah, I guess. I’m, uh. Spilling my guts a lot today.”

“I guess,” Eddie echoes. He stretches his legs out in front of him. “I was just gonna say, you can come to Boston if you want. It’s no big deal.” He’s feeling clumsy, exposed. Richie might talk a lot, but Eddie’s the one who'll suffer for it. Eddie was always gonna be the one to suffer for all of this, had picked the poison to kill him that first time he’d gotten bold and grabby. “I’ll save you a good corner in my dorm. Unless you, like, hook up with some rich local and they want you to spend Thanksgiving sucking up to their oil tycoon grandparents.”

Richie stares at Eddie, and then seems to realize what he’s doing and blinks rapidly a few times. “Right,” he says. “Yeah. That will probably happen. So. No promises.”

Fuck, Eddie thinks. He’s fucking it up again. “If you can find someone in the state of New York willing to touch your dick,” he tries.

“Yeah,” says Richie slowly. “How you like _these_ big apples.” He grabs at his crotch halfheartedly, then lets his hand drop and looks at nothing up the long drive. “That better happen. I just remembered I fucking hate it here.”

“I know,” Eddie says. He follows Richie’s gaze miserably, up the drive where the maple leaves are casting gently shifting shadows. “Me too.” 

Richie snaps back to himself and looks down, shoving his hands in his shorts pockets. “Hey, you wanna see something stupid?” 

“Other than what’s in front of me?”

“Even stupider. Put out your hand.”

Richie pulls something small from his pocket and drops it into Eddie’s palm. It’s a hollow tube of cardboard, about the size of Eddie’s pointer finger, with what looks like a candle wick sticking out one side. 

“I was thinking, since it’s probably Bev’s last weekend,” Richie says. “We could set off some firecrackers or something. I wanted to make my own, you know, with kitty litter and whatever, but I didn’t have all the stuff. It’s kinda more of a you and me thing anyway.”

Eddie turns the tube over in his hand. Richie had taped the ends off neatly, careful the way he can be when he feels like it. It’s so neat and empty, and looking at it makes Eddie’s stomach feel upset. 

“You’ve been carrying this around?” 

Richie puts his hands back in his pockets. “I was thinking we could still finish it. I guess we probably won’t, though.”

Eddie tucks it into his own pocket, not asking if he can. Richie saying _we probably won’t_ makes it feel so determined. Richie has a way of speaking things into being. He speaks Eddie into being all the time, laughing hugely when Eddie snipes at him, or getting so pissed at Eddie’s mom that Eddie starts to feel it too, or bursting out in exasperation, _I swear sometimes Eds is the only one of you who’s not a total chicken shit._

He wonders who he’ll be without Richie around. Hard tellin’ not knowin’, Mr. Hanlon would say, and Eddie hasn’t had to know the answer since he was eleven years old, that summer he and Richie got matching bloody mouths from Henry Bowers’ gang before they were even really friends.

Richie doesn’t have this problem. He’s going somewhere where he can be himself, huge and glowing, making himself bigger and brighter until New York stops feeling like the ocean and shrinks down to something as knowable as the Hanlon pond. Someday even New York will be too small to hold him.

Someday too, Eddie thinks as Richie pulls him off the boulder and they make their way back around the house, Eddie might be driving his own big car in another unknown city. He and Richie will both be zooming away from Derry, far far away until the image is so blurry neither of them will even remember what they escaped. 

The difference is that Eddie already knows he’ll never meet anyone like Richie as long as he lives. The future hardly matters, because Eddie has already seen Richie Tozier’s dusty feet propped up on the dashboard of a junkyard pickup truck. He’s felt Richie’s sweat-sticky arm pressed up against his in the summertime, and he’s tasted Richie’s mouth after too much vodka and a whole packet of gummy worms. There’s nowhere much to go from there. 

+

That night in his bedroom, Eddie peels his dirty socks from his feet and inspects his ankles for ticks. 

He grazes his fingers between his toes, behind his ears, in the crook of his knee. He’d wasted five minutes of his APUSH exam two months earlier, watching in rapt horror as Richie extracted a live tick from the inside of his elbow. Eddie nearly got them both disqualified on their ten-minute break by dragging Richie to an out-of-bounds single stall bathroom, needing to check that the tick’s head had come off along with its body. 

No diseased insects burrowing into his flesh today. Eddie tosses his dirt-streaked socks into the corner of his room, and climbs onto his twin bed, lying with his head dangling off the foot of the mattress.

Eddie’s room hasn’t changed much since middle school. A plastic green slinky dangles from one side of his curtain rod, and the yoyo Richie never mastered hangs from the other. His dresser supports a glass aquarium tank, filled with snail shells and arrowheads and geodes. Over his bed, the ceilings slants low, bare but for a few remaining glow-in-the-dark stars. When Eddie was fifteen he tacked a tapestry there, but that was short-lived. His mom hadn’t said to take it down, but she had said she hoped the dust mites falling into Eddie’s snoring mouth wouldn’t trigger his asthma in his sleep. Eddie pulled it down himself a week later.

His room is full of junk, he thinks. Junk he doesn’t want to throw out or leave behind. He entertains himself briefly, imagining showing up in his dorm at Northeastern with a backpack full of geodes, then shakes himself and turns away.

On the wall next to Eddie’s bed, there’s a curling magazine image of Indiana Jones snapping his whip, held up with sticky tack and artfully collaged with bug-eyed alien stickers to make it look like Harrison Ford is corralling extraterrestrials. The stickers were Richie’s, won from a toy capsule machine when they were thirteen. 

Eddie reaches out and traces one of the aliens with his finger, feeling the bumps of his plaster wall underneath. His mom might take this down if he doesn't do it himself, he realizes, and that thought sends a jolt of panic through his chest. There is so much Richie in his room, enough for a museum, and he’s not sure if he’ll be able to preserve it.

The firecracker shell is still in Eddie’s pocket. He sits up in bed and takes it out. 

It’s gotten a little squished in his pocket, and one taped-down side has popped open. Eddie slides the tube onto his pointer finger like a finger puppet and holds it at eye level.

There’s something inside, a loose scrap of paper. Eddie catches it against the cardboard and coaxes it out. What falls out is a small piece of notebook paper, a list scrawled on it in Richie’s scratchy handwriting.

 _We probably won’t finish it,_ Richie had said, but maybe he hadn’t been too sure, because the list is written relatively neatly, each item on its own straight line. _kitty litter,_ Eddie reads. _charcoal._ _sulfur. 2 pubes from edward “firecrotch” kaspbrak’s blazing loins. potassium nitrate (???)_

Eddie chokes on a laugh. He looks up, grinning and flushed. It’s too much to look at for very long. 

Out the window, the world is turning midnight blue. Eddie watches gray evening clouds move across the sky for a minute, and then looks back at the list, trying to pretend he’s seeing it for the first time. 

Half real and half a joke, the Richie Tozier special. If it’s a joke it’s a joke for _him,_ though. For Eddie. Richie must’ve known he’d read it. Must’ve known, in some way, that the pointless little slip of cardboard would make its way into Eddie’s pocket.

He leans over the list, trying to look over it quickly, searching for clues before it gets overwhelming again. He’s like that for just a moment, and then something light and pointy stabs him on the back of his neck. 

“Fuck,” Eddie mutters, jerking his hand to where he’d been hit. The culprit is stuck in his crew neck—a glow-in-the-dark star that has chosen that moment to fall. He looks at the star in his hand, and then at Richie’s list, and then out the window where the real stars are beginning to shine. 

In a few months Eddie will be beginning again in a new space, without the residue of history or secrets. But there are some things you can carry with you, small enough to fit in your pocket.

Eddie takes Richie’s list and tucks it into his pillowcase. Then he swings his legs off the side of his bed.

There’s a chunky yellow flashlight in his desk drawer that works all right after a good smack. Eddie changes his sweaty t-shirt into a clean one, and pulls on a fresh pair of socks. He goes to the bathroom and washes his face of dried sunscreen, and, after a moment of self-conscious hesitation, brushes his teeth. 

The staircase creaks on his way down, and Eddie is grateful for that, for not needing to announce himself. Across the hall, he can see his mom in the living room, ignoring the quiet TV and rubbing arthritis cream into her hands.

Eddie stops in the doorway. He knows what he's doing and he knows he won't be talked out of it, but all the same, his heart beats hard. “Mom," he says.

She massages the joint of her thumb, not looking up.

“I’m leaving,” Eddie tells his mother. “I’m camping out with my friends.”

Sonia finally looks at him, her eyes tired and dull. “Are you.”

“Yeah.” He holds up his flashlight inanely. Look ma, no need to worry. I’ve got a light to follow.

She doesn’t stare out the window or cry this time. She just looks at Eddie, her face heavy with weariness. “I never know why you want to hurt me," she says.

The flatness in her voice is hard to swallow. Eddie knows it's not affectation—this is a hard summer for her, too. 

He could drop onto the couch beside her. Could put his face on her shoulder and cry like he did as a little boy. Things might get better then, in a way. All better, until the next time, and then the next, until Eddie’s an adult man who knows how to follow peace but not fire. 

“I don’t want that, ma,” he says, and means it. “I’m just going to be with my friends.”

She opens her mouth again, but Eddie has been here before. There’s no winning in a battle like this, and nothing he can do for her now that he knows the only way forward is away. 

“Don’t stay up for me,” he says, getting the words out as quick as he can, and pushes out the front door before his mother can pull him back in.

His bike is propped against the back stoop. People don’t steal bikes in Derry, no more than they break into houses at night to raid the junk drawers. Boston’s gonna be different, Eddie guesses, and he’ll have to get into the habit of keeping things locked away. For a few more months he'll savor this one piece of safety Derry's given him, the assurance that it's okay to spill his life all over the yard. 

Eddie swings his legs over his bicycle seat, puts his feet on the pedals, and takes off into the deep blue night. 

Biking at night is different, scary. You can’t count on street lights outside of downtown, just the occasional gasp of an old-timer’s illuminated front porch, and those get less and less frequent once you cross the Kenduskeag. But his friends are out there, lighting up the darkness, and Eddie can almost feel the bonfire in his stomach, pulling at him.

Above Eddie, stars shine pinpricks through the vast sphere of gray and purple, engulfing the world, while swaying white pines bend around the road and brush the sky. Some college kids come back to Derry talking about how they missed home cooked food, or their own room. Everyone talks about missing the stars.

The Kenduskeag roars louder in the night, making strange dark shapes below the kissing bridge. Eddie might stop on the bridge, listening to the river's deep earth sounds—to try to see it not as a collection of memories, but just as water. Tonight, though, he has somewhere else to be. 

He takes a fork away from the Hanlon farm and whirrs on. The wind is loud in his ears, but even cool nighttime air feels soft in the summer. Eddie cuts behind a derelict shack where an elderly couple once pedalled antiques, down the dirt road a piece, until it twists into the black woods. All the way to the one-room schoolhouse at the very edge of Derry. 

Incongruous relief washes over Eddie. He’s made it. The schoolhouse sits off the dirt road, at the bottom of Green Ash Hill. Behind it, the hill is dotted with boulders and blackberry brambles. It’s perfectly private on the side opposite the road, the exact place for a possibly illegal bonfire. 

Eddie dismounts his bike, walking it over the hill with his head tilted back, following the bright brush of the Milky Way. Dew soaks through his sneakers into his clean socks, but it's not a bad feeling. The schoolhouse used to scare him, but he doesn’t remember why anymore.

Over the sound of crickets and peepers, something else: a murmur of human voices, and the faint, staticky hum of music. Eddie picks up a voice that sounds like Stan's explaining something in a high, happily keyed-up voice; indistinct overlapping responses; and then rising above it all, the muffled bray of Richie’s laughter, blending seamlessly with the sounds of every other creature in Derry who's still awake and chirping. 

Eddie crests the hill, and there they are. His friends, outlined in the moonlight. They're gathered tightly around the orange light of a bonfire on a patch of bare dirt, probably dug out for this purpose years ago. The music is coming from Richie’s plastic windup radio, the exact shade of yellow as Eddie’s flashlight.

For a moment, Eddie drinks them all in: Bev and Richie curled close on an unfurled sleeping bag, shoulder to shoulder. Stan putting kindling on the fire, kneeling on a fluffy blanket Eddie thinks he recognizes from the Tozier living room. Mike is gripping a skinny stick between his knees, using his pocket knife to sharpen the end into something that might spear a marshmallow. 

Eddie pulls his flashlight from his deep jacket pocket, and shines it on his friends.

They all whip around, four identical startled faces. But when Eddie gives them a whoop and a wave, there’s hardly a beat before it comes back to him, magnified.

He trots down to them, letting his bike fall outside of the circle of warmth. There’s room on Mike’s blanket, so he kneels next to him, feeling conflicting waves of sheepishness and pride.

“Hi,” he says.

They all laugh, and Stan shuffles to find him a marshmallow stick. 

“Wish I could’ve seen mommy’s face when you busted out of there,” Richie says across the fire. He smiles at Eddie over the flames, his face looking hazy through the waves of heat. 

“I can’t believe you biked here in the dark,” Mike says. He’s sitting next to two gallons of water that Stan had apparently made them lug along for fire safety. “I’d be jumping at rabbits and biking off the road.” 

“I can,” Richie says immediately. “Remember what Mr. Debrough used to say?” He puts on his generic dad voice, artificially low and stuffy. “That Kaspbrak kid, now, that boy’s got a compass in his head.”

“This is Concord Trailways, right?” Eddie asks. “Get me the fuck out of here.”

Richie grins at him. “Cute.”

“Oh my god,” Bev says, and pushes the side of Richie’s head, laughing. “The rest of us are still here.”

Sitting by a fire always does it, but Eddie’s face feels warm. He pulls his knees up to his chin and grabs his roasting stick, taking a squished marshmallow from the bag. 

“Were you talking to my grandpa today?” Mike asks, nodding to Bev, the normal conversation resuming. “And should I apologize.” 

“No.” Bev laughs. “He was being sweet, I think. He said something about the littlest chicken eggs being hardest to crack, and then he called Richie a rig and told me not to spend too much time talking to boys.”

“He’ll love it when he hears where you’re going to college,” Richie says. Bev will be at Smith in the fall, making a pretty dramatic adjustment to her social circle. “Trust you to pick a school I’m not allowed to visit, Marsh.”

“Why do we have to talk about where we’re going to school like, every single day?” Stan says suddenly. “Does it have to factor into everything?”

Eddie gives him a look. “You got something more important to talk about?” 

Next to him, Mike is watching Stan tensely, holding his marshmallow over the flame without looking at it. 

“I’m not going to UMO,” Stan says. He exhales hard and pushes the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Mike already knows.” 

There’s a moment of stunned silence. 

“God damn, Stanley,” Richie says. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to.” Stan drops his hands and looks at all of them, eyes wide. “There’s nothing there for me. I think I just applied because I didn’t really want to go anywhere else. But I don’t want to go there either.”

“What are you gonna do?” asks Eddie. Plenty of people don’t go off to college, but usually those people aren’t grabbing for a ticket out of Derry. 

“Mr. Hanlon knows some people who have a farm in Vermont,” Stan says, wrapping his arms around himself. “I’m gonna go do a homestay, at least for the fall. And then I guess I’ll apply other places. College of the Atlantic?”

There’s another pause. Beverly breaks it this time. “Well,” she says, and pulls a marshmallow out of the bag. “That makes a lot of sense, Stan.”

Eddie is watching Mike sideways. Mike’s staring into the fire now, swallowing rhythmically. His face reminds Eddie, a little, of how it looked the night of Bill’s going away party. 

“COA is like...three hundred people,” Richie says, sounding anguished. “That’s worsethan UMO.”

Mike raises his chin and looks at Richie levelly. He’s been quiet through so many of these comments lately, Eddie is actually surprised when he opens his mouth. “There’s nothing wrong with going to UMO,” he says. “All kinds of people go there. Scientists. Artists. Writers. And the kind of person you’re thinking about, too, yeah, people who don’t know what they want to do, and people who want to be close to their families. Them too.” 

“I know,” says Richie miserably. “I know, I know. I just...obviously we weren’t ever gonna all live in a big apartment together, this isn’t a sitcom.” 

“Bill’s in New York,” Eddie says. 

Richie laughs dully. “Yeah, he sure is. Up by the Catskills, with all the other little literary prodigies. I’m not gonna—we’re not gonna—I’m going to fucking _Greenwich Village,_ I’m not bringing a _car…”_

Bev untucks her blanket from around her legs and puts it over Richie’s knees, while he blinks angrily into the campfire. 

“Bad time to tell you all I heard my res house has a free hot chocolate bar all winter?” Bev asks lightly. “Heard it’s the real thing, too. Whole milk.” Richie laughs, but it sounds pained. 

“I’m gonna be alone too,” Mike says. “And you’re not, even—Richie, you’re gonna be surrounded with people all the time.”

“I _know,”_ Richie says, one more time, and this time the nerves in his voice are obvious. “And I know you’re getting the worse end of the stick, _not_ because of the UMO thing, okay, just, we’re all fucking off, and I, well. It really is like, I’m getting what I want. I know I don’t have room to...it’s just a lot, right? And I, I’m gonna miss you guys. I don’t know how to start over. But also, like, it does suck you don’t get to.” 

“You probably will, though,” Bev says. “Maybe not completely, but...Orono might be different.”

“It will be,” Mike says, instant conviction. He smiles at Bev over the campfire, letting her know he’s okay. “And even if it’s not...four years isn’t forever.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie says to Mike again. “If you’re not out of here a month after graduation, call us up, Eddie will be making bank by then, he’ll buy us a mystery machine and we’ll book it to California. I swear, Mike, for real. You don’t owe Maine shit. None of us do.”

Stan pokes at the fire with his s’mores stick. “I,” he says, and Eddie can see him flush even by the firelight. “I actually think I might owe it something.” 

“Shit,” Eddie says, cautiously teasing. “It all comes out.”

Richie squints at Stan. “Hello? I thought we were bonded for life through a common enemy.” 

“We’re bonded for life because Bill made us stand in a circle and swap blood,” Stan says. 

“No,” Mike says, “you did that.” He looks around at them, frowning. “That was Stan.”

Richie makes a skeptical face. “If that was Stan, where’d he get the cahunas and where did they go?”

“It _was_ Stan,” Beverly says. “Seriously? Stan and the coke bottle? Eddie?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie says. He holds his hand out in front of him, looking at the faint outline of his scar. 

“Maybe I should start saving for my own mystery machine,” Mike says. He’s trying to smile, but his voice is uncertain. “You guys aren’t even gonna remember this conversation.”

Bev looks around at their morose faces. “You know what I hope I forget,” she says. “Derry Elementary’s buffalo chicken salad. Whenever people talk about college food I’m like okay, it’s fine, I’ve already met Satan and lived.”

Richie laughs quietly.

“In two months I’ll be soaking grease off my pizza with a napkin,” Bev goes on, “and every single drop is gonna remind me that Stan is out there sitting in an apple tree eating Vermont cheddar cheese. How ‘bout you, Eddie?”

She is trying, unsubtly, to lighten the mood. “Yeah,” Eddie says. “Not fair. Hey, Stan, do your new farmers know you need five breaks a day to scrub under your fingernails?”

Mike bursts out laughing. Eddie tries not to look too pleased. 

Richie lets out a long breath, the line of his shoulder relaxing. “We should spare a thought for the lunch ladies,” he says. “They’re gonna all die of broken hearts when Mikey’s gone in the fall.”

“Rita wants to send him a postcard,” Stan says. “She asked for his address.”

Everyone explodes into noise at that, shrill laughter and shrieks of disbelief, and Mike suggesting that Stan better shut up if he wants to make it to Vermont alive. 

Richie doesn’t mention his half-made firecrackers, but he does produce two faded boxes of Morning Glory sparklers from the bottom of his sleeping bag, one last bright surprise. Mike holds one sparkler to the fire, and then the rest of them light their own from his, like a circle of musketeers tapping rapiers. They manage a pretty good show of light and sound. Richie tries spelling his name with the point of his sparkler, making squiggles in the sky. No one can read them, but they’re still fun to watch.

Back around the dying fire, Mike is the first to start yawning, but he passes it to Stan quickly. Halfway through Stan’s rambly, tension-deficient retelling of Not Only Dogs Can Lick, Mike’s chin starts drooping against his chest. Bev gives him a gentle prod. 

“You’re on the sheep’s schedule,” she says affectionately. The rest of them had rigged up a tent before Eddie arrived, about a hundred yards away, where the ground is flatter and less rocky. Bev nods in that direction. “Bedtime?”

“It might have to be.” Mike smiles at her wanly. “Sorry, guys.”

“We did pretty good,” Stan says. He stands up, picking up his blanket with him, and looks at Richie and Eddie. “You have to swear to dump the water on the coals before you go to sleep.”

Eddie is starting to feel pretty sleepy himself, but Stan’s assumption he and Richie will be sitting up together makes him feel strange and warm. “We swear,” he says virtuously.

“Even if it looks like it’s all burned out,” Stan says. 

“Goodnight!” Bev says over her shoulder, linking her arm through Mike’s and steering him toward the tent, wearing her blanket across her shoulders like a cape.

“Night!” Richie calls back. “Stanley, we know. We swear. Cross my heart.”

Stan points at Eddie. “Cross yours too.” 

Eddie crosses it. 

Stan looks back and forth between them for a minute, and then looks like he’s about to smile, and then his face goes all funny and scrunched up.

“Aw, jeez,” says Richie. He gets up and puts his arms around Stan. “It’s okay, dude. Weird night, huh?”

It takes Eddie that long to realize Stanley is crying, or trying not to. He gets to his feet too, feeling awkward. He pats the patch of Stan’s back between Richie’s forearms.

Richie pulls back, holding Stan’s shoulders. “You wanna stay up with us? I still gotta know who’s licking that girl’s hand. Who the fuck could it be?”

“No.” Stan sniffs hard, and Eddie knows he’s wishing for a tissue. “I’m good.” He gives an embarrassed laugh. “I should probably sleep too.”

“We can go to the diner in the morning,” Eddie suggests. “I got eighteen dollars. That’s like, nine blueberry pancakes.”

Stan smiles at the ground. But Richie, looking over Stan’s shoulder, smiles straight at Eddie, locking eyes.

The real understanding that they’re about to be alone swoops down and wallops Eddie. One part of him, the part that’s 99% genetically identical to a scared rabbit, twitches in the direction of the tent. But when you get right down to it, Eddie’s brain is broken in the same place as Richie’s. The two of them rolling, like stones down a hill, toward danger. 

“That’d be good,” Stan says. He rubs his eyes. “Sorry. I’m gonna…yeah. Night, guys.”

He moves between them, cutting Richie’s face from view. Eddie takes the opportunity to sit back down in the flattened grass. Richie watches Stan walk most of the way to the tent, and then he sits down too, next to Eddie.

No matter what Stanley says, the fire really has burnt down to embers. At the edge of the hill the woods go black, but overheard the moon is bright and nearly full. Between the sound of insects and the distant Kenduskeag, the cool press of damp grass and the moonlight giving the hilltop back some color, it’s all too familiar to feel eerie. 

Eddie is conscious of Richie sitting a little too close, the fabric of his long shirt sleeve occasionally brushing against Eddie’s bare arm. It’s chilly, without the heat of the blazing fire. Eddie should have brought a sweatshirt. He picks up one of discarded marshmallow sticks and prods the embers, coaxing a little more life out of them. 

“You want this?” Richie grabs a corner of the remaining sleeping bag in his fist and drags it toward them, pulling it across his own lap. 

Eddie flips over a charred piece of wood and watches it glow. “I’m good.”

Richie shrugs, rearranging the sleeping bag on the ground and lying down on it beside Eddie, looking up at the stars. 

“Weird to see Stan do that,” he says neutrally. “That’s usually me or Bill. I guess just me now. Ha.”

“Could be Mike,” Eddie says, thinking about Mike locked in Bill’s bathroom that night. About Mike tonight, staring at the fire so he didn’t have to look anyone in the eye. “He has, like, the capacity.”

“We’re all gonna do it at some point,” Richie says. He tucks one hand under his head, wriggling into a more comfortable position. “I bet you anything. Deep down this is an all-baby group.”

“Loser muppet babies,” Eddie says. 

“Exactly. ‘Cept you, of course. Big strong deep-sea diving hero.”

Eddie flexes his nonexistent muscles. “Who wants a piece of this.”

Richie straightens his leg and hooks his foot around Eddie’s mosquito-bitten left ankle. Richie’s ankle is cool, almost the exact same temperature as the air. 

“I’m glad you came,” Richie says. “Guess I didn’t piss you off enough.”

“I wasn’t pissed off,” Eddie says. That wouldn’t have even occurred to him. If he had stayed home it’d be because of habit and cowardice, not anger. “I just got in a weird mood.”

“I mean, no sweat if you were. I know I’ve been sort of. You know.”

“No.” 

“Sure you do.” Richie squints up at the sky and laughs. “Annoying.”

Eddie looks at their ankles crossed together. “Not in a bad way.” 

“Annoying in a good way.” Richie laughs again. “God, I’m gonna fucking miss you. No one else is gonna have that read.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Yes they will. That’s like, what everyone thinks when they meet you.”

Richie looks sideways, flashing Eddie the side of a grin. “What do they think when they meet you?”

“The nice version is probably like, _not pissed, just in a weird mood.”_

“In a good way.”

“It's not the same.” Eddie shifts back, leaning on his arms. “Annoying in a good way is like, late night celebrity material.”

“Keeping people on their toes in case you get mad is CEO material!”

Eddie makes a face. “Or shitty uncle material.”

“You can be both. Point is, I’m glad you came. Even with…” It’s too dark to see every quirk of Richie’s face, but Eddie knows this expression well enough that he can practically feel it—Richie crossing his eyes and grinning dopily, his signature look of self-mockery. 

The both go quiet for a minute, listening to the crickets and the gentle rustle of leaves. Richie talks a lot, and when they’re together, Eddie does too. It’s fun to talk together, energy that otherwise might feel stagnant spewing out and flying everywhere. But it’s also not bad to be quiet. Even then, Eddie can feel the broken parts of their brains thrumming back and forth. The way they match up. 

Richie points at the sky, his sleeve falling down his arm. “There’s you,” he says. “See, that bright one’s the last point of your fanny pack. And what’s that sneaking up behind you? Is that a fucking goose?”

His pale arm is so clear against the night it might as well have been cut out from a magazine. “Funny,” Eddie says. “I don’t see you up there. You must’ve got sucked into a black hole.” He hums a few notes of taps. 

“Of course you can’t see me,” Richie says. “I’m in your fanny pack. I tell you where to go. Like Master Blaster.”

Eddie leans toward Richie, feeling for the side of his sleeping bag, and tugs the zipper. It makes a satisfying _zrrrrp._ “That was me zipping you in. Goodbye.”

“Fuck!” Richie flings his arm over his eyes. “Blast you, Blaster! You’ve rendered me blind!”

Richie’s shirt is tugging up his waist, fabric rucked around his armpit. Two or three inches of pale, shivery skin. It reminds Eddie of old nighttime games of hide-and-seek, and how the worst giveaways were always flashes of skin or white eyes. Your face always gave you away, even in the dark. It was easy to hide your face, theoretically, but then you didn’t get to watch the seeker; you couldn’t check that you had stayed hidden, and you missed the adrenaline spike the moment you were found. 

He’s being too slow with a comeback. Richie’s arm is slipping off his eyes, Richie’s face peeking out behind it to check on Eddie. 

Eddie opens his mouth to say something, _wish I could render you mute too,_ anything. “I opened my eyes underwater,” he blurts instead. “When I dived for your glasses.” 

As soon as he says it he knows he was always going to tell Richie. Why would he have done it, if not to tell Richie about it later?

Richie slides his arm across his face and puts it back down at his side. “In the pond?” 

Eddie knocks his knees together, giving himself something physical to pay attention to that’s not in his stomach or chest. “Just at the bottom.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“So I could find them?”

“I wouldn’t have done that.” Richie’s face is creeping into a smile that Eddie can hear, but he’s speaking low, a question in his voice. “That water is _dirty,_ man.”

Eddie kicks his foot against Richie’s, still tangled at the ankles. “I _know_ it’s fucking dirty, I probably have E. coli now, or one of those flesh-eating pathogens your mom is obsessed with. Why would I even bring it up if I didn’t _know_ it was _dirty.”_

“Oh,” says Richie, and rolls onto his side. He pulls his leg away in the movement, but he’s looking at Eddie now, which is maybe worse. “You’re trying to impress me.” 

Eddie stares at him. “I take back annoying-in-a-good-way.”

“You’re dropping it in my lap, dude, this is not on me.”

“Yes it is,” Eddie says. “You know it is.”

They look at each other through the dark. Richie’s mouth twitches. Eddie can almost feel it in his own face, tense and irritating, like waiting for a sneeze that’s taking its time. 

Richie must feel it too. He jerks his head at the embers glowing in the firepit. “Wanna walk over the coals?”

“Oh, for sure. Fantastic. Why would we do that?” 

“Uh, duh. Thrill seeking.”

“If we lived somewhere with actual cliffs you'd be a fucking pancake by now. I’d be rolling you up and carrying you around like a golf caddy.”

“In your fanny pack,” Richie says lovingly. 

_“Zrrpp.”_

“Instead I spent, like, seven years hanging out with you.”

“Yeah, well.” Eddie gives Richie another kick, unable to help himself. “Hope I’ve been good as a cliff.”

“Better.”

Eddie stomach twists. He picks up the marshmallow stick again and pokes Richie’s side with the blunt end. “Bullshit,” he says. 

“Dude,” Richie says, and rolls onto his back. He huffs out his nose. “You don’t even know.” 

Richie’s head is tilted back, the outline of his neck long and clear. 

Eddie has tasted him there. Maybe he tastes different now, though. Salty with sweat, or even minerally from yesterday’s pond water. Even if the taste of his skin was completely unchanged, the important thing is that Eddie thinks he could really pay attention now. Take his time, instead of jumping on Richie like a starving person gobbling up a meal they were meant to enjoy. 

He’s suddenly deeply grateful no one had tried or managed to bring booze. No matter what else happens, at least he’ll get to turn this night over again and again, and know that he had it. 

Eddie puts one hand on the ground and one around his shin, twisting toward Richie. “I don’t know what?” 

“Like.” Richie’s hands go up to his stomach. He studies the sky, giving Eddie the chance to study him. “How bad you could fuck me up if you wanted to.” 

Eddie goes still. He becomes aware of his tongue feeling heavy and awkward against his tacky-dry teeth.

“But then I think,” Richie goes on, eyes still fixed on the sky, “it's dumb to worry about stuff that’s already happened.”

Eddie is getting another rush in his ears. He picks his hand up, to make sure he still can, and runs it through his hair. It goes okay. Just feels a little weird, like he’s a few feet out of his body, controlling his movements through a video game console.

“Is this... Are you thrill seeking right now?” he asks Richie.

The moonlight is reflecting gently off Richie’s forehead and glasses, the lower half of his face shadowy. Still, Eddie can see his tiny grin in the way he tilts his chin down, and can hear it when he opens his mouth. 

“I guess,” Richie says. “Sort of.”

“Just so you know,” Eddie says, speaking through a throatful of cotton, “I don’t take credit for any of the ways you’re fucked up.”

“You could. At least one or two of them.”

“Nothing on your forty-six originals.” 

“And more coming soon,” Richie agrees. “To VHS and a theater near you.”

“I’d watch,” Eddie says. His stomach feels like a boat about to capsize, but he can keep talking. Even when his brain freezes or retreats, he can trust their rhythm. “I’ll book my ticket in advance.”

Richie turns his neck and looks at Eddie, wearing a look Eddie can’t read.

“What?” says Eddie.

“Nothing," says Richie.

“Yeah right.”

“This is so stupid,” Richie says, and laughs. Richie laughs at everything—laughs because things are funny, or because they aren’t funny at all. Sometimes Eddie thinks it hardly matters if Richie is funny or not. Either way, he brings laughter with him. He's generous with it, giving it out for free. With that same tone of self-mockery, Richie says, “I wanna touch you.”

Neither of them are moving much, but inside his body Eddie's brain feels numb and heavy, stuck in a dull, fuzzy roar. 

He opens his dry mouth, matching Richie’s tone as best he can. “So do it,” he says. 

Richie's pretense falters. He hesitates, the hands on his stomach unnaturally still.

They were never supposed to talk about it, not like this, when they’re alone and sober and without an excuse. Of course Richie would turn cautious just at the moment it stopped being a joke.

You know someone long enough, you start getting glimpses of their helpless parts. It’s inevitable—at some point, everyone tells a joke that falls flat, or gets laughed at when they’re trying to be serious. When you have good, real friends, they’re bound to see you in a state you can’t control. If you want to keep them, you have to let that be. 

It’s hard to let someone see you naked, maybe especially someone you trust. It’s hard to admit that when it comes right down to it, all you have to offer is what you’ve got. 

Eddie needs help with stuff like that. Maybe, he thinks, Richie needs help too.

“Do it,” he says again. “I dare you.” 

That works. Richie’s self-effacing smile freezes, and then turns different, surprised and real. He narrows his eyes at Eddie, takes another breath, and pushes himself up onto his forearms.

Richie leans on one elbow, turning toward Eddie, making the space between them feel enclosed and still.

Eddie’s limbs still feel weirdly heavy where he’s sitting, but he feels giddy too, fluttering. Finally, he’s getting it right. 

Richie puts out his hand. He holds it in front of his chest for a minute, looking at Eddie. Then he lays his fingertips on the tender spot of Eddie’s left arm, right above the crook of his elbow.

Richie never turns down a dare, but maybe that’s because a dare is sort of like a secret, or a confession. Another way of saying _I want you to._ Most of Eddie’s dares turn into double-dares anyway, into _I will if you do._ He’d never ask Richie to do something they couldn’t do together. Would never send Richie somewhere he had to go alone.

The spot where Richie’s touching him feels so warm and alive it might be glowing. Eddie straightens one leg and leans further sideways, pushing into Richie’s hand. He catches Richie’s other wrist in his hand. 

“Remember this,” Eddie says. He puts his own finger lightly on Richie’s wrist, and starts slowly zig-zagging it up his arm. An old game: close your eyes and tell me when I reach your elbow. Harder than it sounds, to guess someone else’s position just from a feeling. 

“I always sucked at that,” Richie says, his voice cracking a little. 

“Yeah, you did.” Eddie looks at his hand on Richie’s arm. Richie’s hand is still on Eddie’s arm, too, unmoving. Suddenly he agrees with Richie. It really is very stupid. 

A laugh bubbles up from deep in his stomach. It comes out breathy and uncontrollable, making him shake. 

Richie’s hand presses into his arm gently. “Yes?” 

“Nothing,” Eddie says, but he’s still laughing. “Just. Like. Is this what you had in mind?”

Richie jerks his shoulders. “Maybe,” he says. “I don’t plan ahead.” Eddie’s laughter is making him relax. He’s smiling, not the bright beam he shoots at Eddie almost every day, but something made for smaller spaces. He leans forward, sloping toward Eddie in the dark. 

“Sounds like a serious condition,” Eddie says. 

“Dude,” Richie says reproachfully. “You know I’m on dexedrine.”

They’ve never been like this before. Messing around drunk on a bedroom floor has never felt risky in the way it does to lean toward each other, keenly sober and laughing in a field in the middle of the night. Mr. and Mrs. Tozier could’ve burst into Richie’s room any time, but even then it wouldn’t have meant the same thing it means here, now, between them and the cicadas and the stars.

That’s pretty cool, Eddie thinks loopily, something brand new after seven years of thinking he knew Richie inside out. Is this the final frontier? It can’t be, not while they’re both still anticipating so much life. 

Eddie pushes his arm against Richie more firmly. 

Richie skates his hand up Eddie’s arm, leaving a warm trail of touch all the way to his short sleeve. When Richie runs out of arm, he holds onto Eddie’s shoulder, gentle but firm. It is just about the best thing Eddie has ever felt. 

Richie was right about the thrill seeking. Eddie wants more of it. He wants to roll toward Richie the way the whole state wants to roll toward the ocean.

Eddie’s body is heavy and clumsy and full of warmth. He inhales through his mouth, and then tucks his legs under himself. He puts one hand and a knee firmly in the dirt, and leans over until his upper body is dangling above Richie’s. 

With Eddie over him, Richie has to lie further back. He lowers down on his elbows, giving Eddie room to hover above him. He looks good from this angle. Surprised again. 

“Uh,” says Richie, and laughs nervously. His other hand comes up and holds onto Eddie’s matching shoulder. That is pretty crazy, but not crazier than Richie’s eyes flickering across Eddie’s face, checking again that it’s all real. “Is that, uh. That you, mister postman?” 

“Yeah.” Richie’s face is so close to his. His sweat, his nose, the familiar smell of his breath. Eddie has never thought to wonder if their friends know Richie’s face like this, if they love the space between his front teeth. “Knock knock.”

Richie’s mouth opens a bit, and there’s a lag before he speaks, like in one of his kung fu movies. “Come in,” he says. 

It feels like Eddie’s got ocean phosphorescence sparking all the way from his feet to the back of his neck. He inhales shakily, and sinks his body against Richie. 

Richie’s mouth doesn’t taste like cinnamon anymore. It tastes like s’mores, and fire, and himself. Eddie was right. It is better this time.

If it wasn’t for the part of Eddie that’s touching Richie, his body might be dissolving into the air. Nothing left but mouth and warm cheeks and eyes, opening and shutting gently to check that everything’s okay. It feels that way until Richie puts his arms around Eddie’s neck and pulls him closer, bringing him down flush. Then Eddie has a body again.

When Eddie breaks away, breathing hard against Richie’s mouth, Richie’s glasses are smudged and pushed too high on his face. He looks slack and dazed. Eddie balances on his arms, pulling back far enough that they can make eye contact. He needs to know.

Behind his glasses, Richie’s eyes focus on Eddie. He smiles at him, and pushes his hands up into Eddie’s hair.

“All _right,”_ says Richie, sounding drunk. 

Eddie’s shirt is billowing under him. He tucks his nose into the neck to hide his grin. It’s pretty pointless. He can’t stop looking at Richie, and he knows the grin is all over his face, crinkling his eyes.

Richie’s hands slip down to either side of Eddie’s head, cupping his ears. Looking at each other, they both start giggling. 

All right, Eddie thinks. He is realizing something that probably should have already been obvious. This is the thing. This is the thing that, when he's old, he'll remember. 

Richie deserves to hear it. He wants to wrap Richie up in something, cover him, keep him warm. 

“You’re my favorite person,” Eddie says through his shirt, his brain humming nonsense. “You’re.” He forgets what he was going to say, so he repeats himself. “My favorite.”

Richie makes a noise that sounds like a tiny shout stuck in his throat. “I’ll remember that,” he croaks. “You’re mine, too. Like. Of anyone.”

Eddie must’ve known that, but it feels so good to hear it. Good like biking down a hill on a perfect day, good like drifting safely in sun-warmed water. Richie puts his hand carefully on the back of Eddie’s neck, and Eddie feels like a bubbly can of soda being tapped from the outside, carbonation shooting through him. He drops his head down, and kisses Richie again. 

Eddie could get drunk off this feeling. Maybe he already is, and he’ll spend the rest of his life chasing the high of feeling like he’s doing right, and that everything is right around him.

At some point Richie puts his hand tentatively at the hem of Eddie’s shirt, and when Eddie pushes against him, he slides his arm up under the fabric. He just rests it there, his hand unfurled in the middle of Eddie’s chest. Maybe he’s being careful, or maybe he’s thinking about their friends sleeping only a couple hundred feet away, but it’s still enough to make Eddie think his body has nerves he never knew existed. That’s another revelation—the idea that Richie could touch Eddie and find some truth about his body that even Eddie hadn’t known. 

He can hear the rain start before he feels it. At first, it just sounds like the pleasant static in Eddie’s ears and brain is taking over the world. But Richie laughs against his mouth, and stretches his own hand out to feel the drizzle, and swears happily. 

Eddie pulls back and laughs, too. It’s a very light rain, but it’s unavoidable. Within seconds Richie’s glasses are misted over. 

Richie opens his palms to the sky and whisper-wails, _“Why!”_

“I am not going in that tent,” Eddie says. The idea feels perverse right now. “I’d rather just get the pneumonia.”

“In that case,” Richie says agreeably, and puckers up.

“You fucking dork,” Eddie says, even though he doesn’t feel like Richie’s a dork at all, not right now. “Didn’t anyone check the weather?”

“I don’t care,” Richie says. “I’m ultrahydrophobic.”

Eddie darts back down, feeling daring, and licks a disgusting wet swipe across Richie’s cheek. 

Richie barks shocked laughter and sits up, tossing Eddie back on the grass. He grabs Eddie’s wrist and tries to pin him, but Eddie fights dirty, kicking hard enough to make his track coach proud, and sticking his tongue close to Richie’s face as an intimidation tactic. That only works for a second, though, because Richie does something Eddie never would’ve imagined, and kisses the tip of his pointed tongue. 

“You are so gross,” Eddie says, grinning and blushing and wriggling hard. He grabs Richie’s head between his hands, the way he did the very first time, and pulls him down. 

He had been half right, when he guessed how things would go this summer—they really have been getting more and more disgusting. 

Eddie can feel Richie’s muscles relaxing, melting into the kiss. It’s pretty surprising. Eddie has known Richie for most of his life, at least most of his life that counts, but right now he’s getting something about Richie that he doesn’t think has occurred to him before. 

His hair and forehead are getting damp. Eddie’s got a warm fire glowing inside of him, but at a certain point his human body is gonna catch up and start feeling uncomfortable. “What should we do?” he asks.

Richie pauses, sitting on Eddie’s legs, and thinks about it. “Sleeping bag?”

There’s not really a comfortable way to fit two people in a single sleeping bag, but it could be worse. Richie’s sleeping bag is one of those extra-long ones from LL Bean, flannel-lined and comfortably worn. Most importantly, the shell is waterproof, as long as you avoid the hole near the bottom. Richie drags it a few feet from the firepit while Eddie goes back to pick up one of Stan’s jugs of water. 

“It’s literally raining,” Richie says. But Eddie, feeling like he owes the world something, pours the water over the coals anyway. 

On the way around the firepit, goose pimples raising on his damp bare arms, Eddie grabs Richie’s wind-up radio. “Hold on,” he says to Richie, and stuffs it down into the foot of the sleeping bag, protecting it from the rain. 

“You’re so nice to me,” Richie says. Eddie can’t tell if he’s teasing or serious. Could be a bit of both.

They climb into the sleeping bag, Richie first and then Eddie, squeezing close. 

“Zrrp,” Eddie says, and zips them in. He’s not sure what their sleeping position is supposed to be, but he knows he wants to talk to Richie, so he turns around to face him.

With the clouds overhead and no embers left, it’s dark-dark, but that’s okay. The sleeping bag is soft, and it zips all the way up, presumably in case of rain. 

“I’m going in,” Eddie says, and burrows down into the sleeping bag until it’s over his head, out of the damp. Richie wriggles to join him, folding the top of the sleeping bag so it stays open enough that they can still breathe.

Richie reaches for Eddie under the sleeping bag and takes hold of his elbow. Eddie wants something to hold onto, too, so he catches Richie’s cool fist and tucks it under his chin. 

“Eds?” Richie’s voice is quiet now, filling such a small, muffled space. Eddie can’t see Richie at all, but he can feel his body heat and the way the sleeping bag curves around him. 

He doesn’t correct the nickname. “What?”

“This isn’t like, a pretend-not-to-remember-in-the-morning thing, is it?”

Eddie gives Richie’s thumb one gentle bite. “Naw,” he says.

Richie rustles a little bit, and Eddie thinks he can sense him feeling pleased. “So,” he presses on. “Like. Can I tell Bev?” 

That one surprises Eddie. “You want to?”

“I don’t have to,” Richie says at once. 

“No, I mean. I thought you didn't want to talk about it.”

“Why'd you think that?”

“I don’t know. Because you never did.”

“You started it, dude. You started it, and then you didn’t talk to me for two days.”

Objectively speaking, that is kind of true. Eddie had spent those two days so petrified with fear, ducking around the corner to avoid Richie, putting off the moment when he’d find out if things were changed in a good way or a bad way or not at all.

“You can tell Bev,” he says, “if I can tell Mike.”

Eddie can hear Richie grinning. “Who’s telling Stan?”

“Let’s not tell Stan. Practical joke.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Sure it is. I think he’s smart enough to figure it out. I’ll just spit in your mouth in front of him, he’ll get it.”

“Maybe,” Richie says, laughing. “Maybe not. That’s not outside the realm of like, potential normal behavior.” 

Thank god it’s summer, because Eddie is not going to be able to concentrate on much else with Richie in front of him. He’ll have to go to another room to hold a conversation with anyone else. Leave it up to him and they won’t tell anyone at all—not because it’s a secret, but just because now that they’ve said it to each other, saying it to anyone else feels a lot less important. 

“I’ll tell Stan,” he says, and yawns against Richie’s fist. “Or you can. Whatever. I don’t care.” 

Richie settles against him, pressing their forearms together. They’ve slept in the same bed before, but not in years. The intentional touch feels so different. 

“I’m in a really, really good mood,” Richie tells him quietly. “I’m really happy.”

It’s a little scary again, under the covers. But Eddie likes scary things sometimes. He turns his hand against Richie’s arm and scratches him lightly with one fingernail. “Me too,” he says.

Some people get shitty versions of this. Embarrassing stories, twisted memories they'd rather forget. But Eddie, Eddie gets the sweetest, richest thing in the world.

He doesn't expect to fall asleep, what with adrenaline and clammy goose pimples and Richie pressed so close, but he does. Soon his brain is going hazy, humming again. Blending images, suggesting dreams. 

Moonlight shooting through water. The surface of a pond held in a Pinnochio glass. A sleeping bag full of yoyos and glittery stones. A field as big as Central Park turning brilliant red. Falling stars spelling names. A skinny greyhound, _trying to be cunnin’,_ running for hours through big bright cities, running without getting tired, all for the chance to lick someone’s cheek.

**Author's Note:**

> my hope is that the regionalisms i shoehorned into this are not too confusing or distracting, but i did think i should clarify one of them—when leroy hanlon calls richie a rig, he is basically saying he's a big personality who likes attention. i recently heard that in australia this means a hot person or smth, and nope!
> 
> thanks for reading! if i may be corny for one moment, clowntown has really helped me recommit to writing for fun over the past year (holy fuck), and i'm very grateful. every time i hear one of you enjoyed something i wrote, love radiates from my eyeballs into my computer screen and out to wherever you are. ok i listened to a lot of rem while writing this i'm feeling dramatic.
> 
> if you've never seen a red blueberry field [check it out](https://www.google.com/search?q=red+blueberry+fields+&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjXtfmw77TrAhWQC98KHZGECrAQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=red+blueberry+fields+&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoECCMQJzoCCABQ8x9Yjyxgvy1oAHAAeACAAXuIAasDkgEDNC4xmAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=oDxEX9flN5CX_AaRiaqACw&bih=785&biw=1328)
> 
> [title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YHU6BwPR0) (typical)  
> [tumblr](http://jonasblackwood.tumblr.com/)
> 
> thank you [orestesfasting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orestesfasting/) for making this better. love u


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